Economic aspects of cutting with diamond-coated wire

Cutting with diamond-coated wire is of a great importance at shaping hardly workable materials. As the time goes by, due to the tool wear, cutting abilities of diamond wire are reduced up to 50%. Because of variable cutting capacity, using the full machining capacity of a wire in its entire lifetime would require a highly complicated feed drive kinematics of machine tools. The decreasing cutting capacity increases the operation costs and makes difficult taking the decision on the wire replacement. The paper presents a methodology of determining time, efficiency and costs of cutting with diamond wire. The results were verified with an experimental example. The presented mathematical formulae, used for the required transformations and calculations, have simple mathematical structure that is easy to be used in industrial conditions.