Development and machining performance of a textured diamond cutting tool fabricated with a focused ion beam and heat treatment

This paper presents the fabrication method and machining performance of a textured diamond cutting tool. To improve the machining performance, a texture was fabricated on the rake face of the diamond tool with a depth of 43 nm and width of 1.8 μm by utilizing a focused ion beam (FIB) followed by heat treatment. In addition, a FIB-induced non-diamond phase that adversely affects the machining performance was removed. A machining experiment using aluminum alloy and nickel phosphorus was conducted to evaluate the proposed method. A significant decrease in friction was observed at the tool-chip interface after texturing. This corresponds to a reduced cutting force, which indicates that the machining performance of the tool was improved by texturing. The magnitude of the effect depends on the shape and direction of the texture. The textured tool was able to machine a surface topography similar to that with a non-textured tool, which indicates that the texture effect can be obtained while maintaining the quality of the machined surface by fabricating the texture far from the cutting edge.