Characterisation of diamond composites for tooling

Abstract

While diamonds are the hardest known materials in nature, they also have extremely high abrasion resistance which has been exploited to a limited extent in the mining, civil construction and manufacturing industries. An inexpensive abrasive wear test has been developed and applied in this study to assess the quality of a range diamond composite materials. The abrasive resistance of commercially available diamond composites is observed to span over 4 orders of magnitude. Microstructural and phase distribution studies of these composites indicate poor quality control during the manufacture of these diamond composites.