Abstract

DLC coated tools have been widely utilized in the dry milling and cutting of aluminum alloy parts and components for automotive industries and cellular phone makers. Most of these tools are inevitably exchanged with new ones to preserve high quality of machined products. Then, the used DLC coating must be removed or ashed away before grinding and polishing. Complete removal of used DLC coating plays a key to make DLC-recoating onto the ashed surface of tools for their reuse. High density oxygen plasma ashing provides a solution to make perfect ashing of DLC coating together with metallic interlayers before recoating. In the present paper, this plasma system with quantitative diagnosis instrumentation is first stated to describe the effect of processing conditions on the ashing behavior. Two types of end-milling tools were prepared to prove that the whole DLC-coating should be completely removed with fast rate. This ashed tool substrate was ground and DLC-recoated to demonstrate that the reused tools have the same machinability in dry as the original virgin tools through dry milling experiments.

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