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The Impact of Surging Tungsten Prices on the Cemented Carbide Industry
Metal Cutting Tools and Cemented Carbide Tools
I. Classification of Metal Cutting Tools
Metal cutting tools remove excess material from workpieces via cutting, grinding and other methods in mechanical processing to meet preset size, precision and surface quality. As a core part of CNC machine tools, they directly determine machining efficiency (high-speed cutting shortens working hours) and precision (dimensional tolerance, surface roughness).
2.1 Classification by Material
(1) High-Speed Steel Tools: Alloy tool steel with iron as the matrix, plus tungsten, molybdenum, chromium and vanadium. They have high toughness but poor thermal stability and wear resistance, mainly for medium and low-speed cutting.
(2) Cemented Carbide Tools: The most mainstream (over 70% market share), made from tungsten carbide, cobalt and nickel, with balanced performance, mainly for high-speed cutting like CNC machining.
(3) Ceramic Tools: Made from alumina and silicon nitride, with excellent high-temperature resistance and hardness, mainly for finishing high-hardness materials.
(4) Superhard Tools: Include PCD and CBN, with the highest hardness and wear resistance but high brittleness, cost and machine tool requirements.
II. Overview of Cemented Carbide Tools
Cemented carbide tools use tungsten carbide as the hard phase, cobalt/nickel as the binder phase, and adopt powder metallurgy. They have high hardness, good thermal stability and wear resistance, suitable for most metals and high-end manufacturing, but weak toughness, impact resistance and high difficulty in complex shape forming.
By composition, they divide into tungsten-cobalt (rough machining), tungsten-titanium-cobalt (finishing) and tungsten-titanium-tantalum-cobalt (highly versatile). By process, they cover turning, milling, drilling and other tools. The global market is an oligopoly, with leading manufacturers including Sandvik, Kennametal, Iscar and Mitsubishi Materials.
