Evaluation of the adhesion strength of diamond films brazed on K-10 type hard metal

Abstract

The coating of cutting tools with diamond films considerably increases the tool performance due to the combination of the unique tribological properties of diamond with the bulk properties of the substrate (toughness). The tool performance, however, is strongly related to the adhesion strength between the film and the substrate. In this work our main goal was to propose and to test a procedure, based on a tensile strength test, to evaluate the adhesion strength of a diamond wafer brazed on a hard metal substrate, taking into account the effect of the brazing temperature and time. The temperature range studied was from 800 to 980 °C and the brazing time ranged from 3 to 40 min. The obtained results could be used to optimize the costs and time required to the production of high performance cutting tools with brazed diamond wafers.