Introduction and history of ceramic knife

The emergence of ceramic cutter blades has changed the way the cutter industry views materials, so let's take a look at what ceramic cutters are today.

Ceramic knives are made of special ceramic raw materials that are non-metallic materials, due to the control of raw material purity and particle size refinement, and the addition of a variety of carbides, nitrides, borides and oxides to improve its performance, while improving its fracture toughness through the synergy of particles, whiskers, phase changes, microcracks and several toughening mechanisms, not only to increase the flexural strength to 0.9-1.0GPa (high can reach 1.3-1.5GPa), and fracture toughness and impact resistance have been greatly improved, 

The application range is increasingly expanded, from the original for aerospace and other high-tech fields, expanded to industrial ceramic knives, the last two years widely used in civil ceramic knives in the last two years has appeared in civil ceramic knives, not only has more than steel knives sharp, and acid and alkali resistance, non-conductive, no chemical reflection of food, is a typical Green products, can cut meat and other food under freezing conditions, cutting fruit without discoloration, cutting onions without stinging and other characteristics. In industry, in addition to general finishing and semi-finishing, it can also be used for roughing under impact loads, and is recognised internationally as a tool with potential to improve productivity.

Ceramic tools have an aluminium oxide (Al2O3) zirconium oxide (ZrO2) base and silicon nitride (Si3N4) base, etc., and are characterised by high work efficiency, long service life and good machining quality. In the past, due to low flexural strength and brittleness, they have long been used mainly as finishing tools, accounting for a small proportion of all types of tool materials. But in recent years, at present, ceramic tools can be 200 ~ 1000m/min cutting speed high-speed processing of steel, cast iron and its alloys and other materials, tool life than carbide several times higher, or even dozens of times. 

At the same time, the emergence of its traditional process concept has changed, the use of ceramic tools can be used directly to turn, milling instead of grinding (or throwing) hardened parts processing, a single process instead of multiple processes, greatly reducing the process flow. In production they can be used for general turning, boring and milling processes, and more successfully for machining. In addition to being used in general machine tools, it can also be used effectively in equipment such as CNC machine tools. 

Compared with diamond and CBN (cubic boron nitride) and other superhard tools, the price of ceramic is relatively low, so some people think: "With the continuous improvement of modern ceramic tool material performance, in the future it will become three main tools for high-speed machining together with coated carbide tools, diamond and CBN and other superhard tools."