Dry run

The new coating, that extends the Nanolock field of application not only provides high protection against wear and extends the in-cut life of the insert due to its elastic damping effect, it also helps to withstand the severe impact stresses created by high productivity milling processes.

Nanolock Black milling inserts, now available through LMT UK capitalise on LMT's expertise in chemical vapour deposition (CVD) to deposit the Kappa-A1203 ceramic layer to the titanium carbonitride (TiCN) coating. Due to the ‘zip-fastener' bonding of the nanostructure, the effects of abrasion on the insert are minimal and any tendency for ‘thermal comb' cracks to develop are resisted. The new coating also means any surface oxidation is prevented when used in dry milling applications.

The introductory Universal Nanolock LC230E milling insert was initially applied to demanding applications such as machining the edges of steel plates for pipelines and resurfacing manganese-steel railway lines, where the Black coating has been successfully run at cutting speeds up to 300m/minute.

Central to Nanolock's performance capability is the ultra-fine needle shaped surface adhesion characteristics achieved through development of its coating technology that was originally pioneered by LMT's Boehlerit division and launched some two years ago on the LMT Steeltec LC215K turning insert.

At that time the company perfected the technology to work at nanostructure levels (1 nanometre = 1 billionth of a metre) that enabled the crystallite size of particles to be reduced. Also by mixing the elements of carbon and nitrogen used in TiCN coatings it was able to strategically improve the bonding of the different material particles.

Last year a claimed world first was credited to LMT with Nanosphere Red, a nanocomposite multi-layer coating of titanium, aluminium and nitrogen (TiAlSiN) for milling hardened materials and high tensile steels up to 68 HRC. Nanosphere Red has the capability to be worked at temperatures over 200°C higher than existing aluminium nitride coatings, which typically cannot exceed 850°C. The coating also enables the working life of LMT's inserts to be significantly improved.

Since the original launch of the Steeltec LC215K indexable insert for turning, LMT's application engineers have repeatedly demonstrated the advantages of the extreme levels of hardness without brittleness achieved with Nanolock coatings when machining steel at over 300m/minute. Even when running at these high cutting speeds, the applications have still recorded improvements of over 50% in the effective cutting life of the insert. As a result, over 1,000 successful installations of Nanolock coated turning inserts have been achieved.

The Nanolock Black coating is now available in a wide range of ISO indexable milling inserts and is acceptable on all the common tool systems freely available on the market.

LMT
www.lmt-tools.com