Crack Analysis of Micro-Textured Cutting Tool

Texturing on the tool rake surface is one type of crack induced on the tool surface by surface-texturing technologies that have the potential to produce micro-cracks. The surface grooves may act as notches that will lead to stress concentration and eventually initiate the crack or propagate the induced cracks. This work has attempted to study crack initiation and propagation, particularly on the textured tool with V-shaped cross-section grooves provided to the textured tool model. To investigate this, the extended finite element method is used to govern the initiation and propagation of fractures in the tool domain. Results obtained from the study suggested that textured tools are substantially more prone to cracking than untextured tools. Its critical displacement value for the untextured tools is about 55 % more compared to the textured tool. Findings led to the conclusion that the depth, width, and pitch of the grooves have a direct impact on tool cracking.