PI: Syed Akhtar
CoI: Khaled Al-Athel, Numan Khalil, Ahmed Sarhan

There is a constant need for designing and manufacturing novel cutting tool inserts, which is driven by the competitive tool manufacturing market particularly for machining hard-to-cut materials. The scope of this project is to design and manufacture a new class of hybrid SiALON-based cutting inserts by introducing a novel concept of functionally graded materials (FGM). The overall objective is to computationally design, manufacture and virtually test FG SiAlON-based ceramic cutting inserts to achieve enhanced performance. By designing such tool materials with hybrid phases in each layer of the functionally-graded composites, the thermal gradient and thermal stresses will be controlled which is expected to improve the structural properties especially the thermal fracture resistance under severe cutting conditions. At the material design stage, the mean-field homogenization and effective medium theory will be used to predict the effective structural properties leading to the desired thermomechanical response of the designed functionally graded composites comprising of hybrid phases with SiAlON as a matrix in each layer. An effective medium approximation will be used to predict the potential optimum thermal properties. After the material design stage, cutting inserts in various geometries will be manufactured using Spark Plasma Sintering (SPS) technique. Mechanical, thermal, and tribological properties will be measured experimentally and the computational designs will be validated. The last stage of the project will be to virtually test the tools through machining modeling and simulation to study the stresses, thermal gradients and heat flow to measure the performance as a function of various parameters. A breakthrough in the local industry is expected to occur by this innovative integrated material design and simulation approach. The proposed approach is not only expected to cut down the research and development time in manufacturing innovative inserts but also integrating the proposed design and simulations with the reliable manufacturing methods such as SPS route would open up the possibility of producing competitive cutting inserts for specific operations