Cemented Carbide - Hard Compound Alloy Materials of Metals and Their Diversified Applications

2025-06-06 11:11:10

Cemented CARBIDE, an alloy material made by powder metallurgy from hard compounds of refractory metals and binder metals, is renowned for its outstanding properties. It not only boasts extremely high hardness and excellent wear resistance but also maintains superior strength and toughness at high temperatures, being resistant to heat and corrosion. It is considered a top performer among metal materials. Particularly, at 500°C, its hardness and wear resistance remain almost intact, and it still retains high hardness even at 1000°C, making it an ideal material choice for tool manufacturing and other fields.

Cemented carbide finds extensive applications, from turning tools, milling cutters, planing knives to drill bits and boring tools. It can handle the cutting of cast iron, non-ferrous metals, plastics, chemical fibers, graphite, glass, stone, and ordinary steel with ease. Even when processing difficult materials such as heat-resistant steel, stainless steel, high manganese steel, and tool steel, it performs exceptionally well.

1. Performance Characteristics

Cemented carbide stands out due to its remarkable performance characteristics. It has a high hardness ranging from 86 to 93 HRA, equivalent to 69 to 81 HRC, which enables it to exhibit excellent wear resistance in various applications. Additionally, it possesses good thermal hardness, maintaining a hardness of 60 HRC at temperatures up to 900 to 1000°C. This property ensures its outstanding cutting performance even in high-temperature environments.

2. Applications and Limitations

Despite its numerous advantages, such as high cutting speed and long tool life, cemented carbide is relatively brittle and not suitable for cutting operations. Therefore, to fully leverage its performance advantages, it is typically fabricated into various shaped inserts and installed onto tool bodies or die sets through welding, bonding, or mechanical clamping. However, this also limits its ability to directly manufacture complex-shaped integral tools.