Blade Segment with a 3D Lattice of Diamond Grits Fabricated via an Additive Manufacturing Process

Abstract Diamond tools with orderly arrangements of diamond grits have drawn considerable attention in the machining field owing to their outstanding advantages of high sharpness and long service life. This diamond super tool, as well as the manufacturing equipment, has been unavailable to Chinese enterprises for a long time due to patents. In this paper, a diamond blade segment with a 3D lattice of diamond grits was additively manufactured using a new type of cold pressing equipment (AME100). The equipment, designed with a rotary working platform and 16 molding stations, can be used to additively manufacture segments with diamond grits arranged in an orderly fashion, layer by layer; under this additive manufacturing process, at least 216000 pcs of diamond green segments with five orderly arranged grit layers can be produced per month. The microstructure of the segment was observed via SEM and the diamond blade fabricated using these segments was compared to other commercial cutting tools. The experimental results showed that the 3D lattice of diamond grits was formed in the green segment. The filling rate of diamond grits in the lattice could be guaranteed to be above 95%; this is much higher than the 90% filling rate of the automatic array system (ARIX). When used to cut stone, the cutting amount of the blade with segments made by AME100 is two times that of ordinary tools, with the same diamond concentration. When used to dry cut reinforced concrete, its cutting speed is 10% faster than that of ARIX. Under wet cutting conditions, its service life is twice that of ARIX. By applying the machine vision online inspection system and a special needle jig with a negative pressure system, this study developed a piece of additive manufacturing equipment for efficiently fabricating blade segments with a 3D lattice of diamond grits.