Study on characteristics of AlTiN and TiCN coating layers deposited on carbide cutting tools in hard turning of steel: experimental, simulation and optimisation

Objective of the present work is focused to study the characteristics of monolayer PVD-coated carbide AlTiN and TiCN cutting tools. Some features related to machinability such as tool wear, tool life, and surface roughness were adopted to study the tools characteristics. Moreover, effort was also paid to determine the cutting condition for both cutting tools that subjected to another feature, namely volume of material removal (VMR). The results of experiment showed that AlTiN gained higher cutting condition than TiCN due to higher usage temperature of its coating material. However, TiCN produced higher VMR than AlTiN and longer tool life. Flank wear and chipping were observed as the wear modes of both cutting tools. Surface roughness was resulted at the quality of medium finish. The finite element method was utilised to provide an orthogonal cutting simulation for resulting the map of cutting temperature distribution at the tool-chip interface. Finally, multi-objective genetic algorithm optimisation was employed for obtaining the optimum yield of VMR.