Drilling carbon fiber-reinforced composite material at high speed

Abstract Increasing cutting speed will reduce machining time and hence improve productivity. Drilling is one of the most important cutting operations which are currently carried out on fiber-reinforced composites. Therefore, it is of interest to study the effects of increasing cutting speed on drilling characteristics of carbon fiber-reinforced composite materials. In this paper, the effects of increasing cutting speed ranging from 9550 up to 38 650 rev min−1 (from 210 to 850 m min−1) on average thrust force, torque, tool wear and hole quality for both multifacet drill and twist drill are studied. It is found that increasing cutting speed will accelerate tool wear. And the thrust force increases as drill wear increases. Although tool geometries change quickly due to the fast development of tool wear and the thrust force increases drastically as cutting speed increases, an acceptable hole entry and exit quality is maintained. This is because relatively small feeds are used in this tests. It can be concluded that tool wear is the major problem encountered when drilling carbon fiber-reinforced composite materials at high speed.