The wear of the carbide cutting tools coated with TiN during the milling of Inconel 738

The machining of superalloy parts still an area not very clear in mechanical manufacturing. It is found to be used in particular areas such as gas turbine, rocket engine, space ships, nuclear reactors, and pumps. The machining of Inconel 738 superalloy has been studied in this context, with the aim to understand the wear behavior with carbide inserts coated with TiN and in order to optimize the cutting parameters before starting the production. The wear behavior of the inserts during the machining process of a very tough austenitic superalloy is unclear, and requires a series of well determined tests. The life of the insert under high stress such as pressure, cutting speed, high temperature, in a hostile zone and in contact with a very tough and harder material is determined. The generated process of wear is very complex, because it is followed by physico-chemical phenomenon appearing on the contact surfaces between the active part of the tool and workpiece.The lifetime of machine tools often depends on the tribological characteristics of the material couples (cutting tool / material to be machined). It has been shown that the most influential parameter is the coating, then comes the sliding speed. A relationship between the wear VB and the roughness Ra is proposed to collect information on the cutting edge and the quality of the tool by measuring the roughness. For wear measurement, an indirect method is used in coupling a Touptek photonics camera to capture and Ttoupview analysis software.