Beschreibung
In this study, the authors investigate the laser dressing of metal bonded diamond blades by means oflaser pulses with different pulse durations and wavelengths. Conventional dressing suffers fromexcessive blade wear, whereas laser dressing enables precise removal of the bonding metal to generatethe required chip space of protruding diamond grains. The challenge for processing this compositematerial is to find appropriate level of ablation for the bonding metal without damaging the diamondgrains through cracking or graphitization. For worn out blades, the influence of pulse duration andwavelength on laser dressed surface topography and bonding metal removal is studied. Theexperiments are performed with 532 and 1064 nm laser radiation with pulse durations from 12 ps to20 ns. The blade surface topography and bonding metal removal of the dressed blades are measuredwith a confocal microscope, where the protruding diamond grains are identified by scanning electronmicroscope examinations. The dressing results show the bonding metal removal for the available lasersources in the studied pulse duration range, with the increasing number of protruding diamond grainsfor shorter pulse durations. The results indicate a significant increase of blade lifetime for laser dressedblades compared to conventional dressing methods
