Experimental investigation on the effect of crystal orientation of diamond tooling on micro laser assisted diamond turning of zinc sulfide

The present article reports on an experimental study of the effect of crystallographic orientation of single crystal diamond on ductile material removal of ZnS. A multispectral ZnS workpiece was machined with single crystal diamond tools having two different configurations of cutting plane and cutting direction. An x-ray diffractometer (XRD) was used to evaluate the cutting plane and cutting direction of each tool. It was observed that the tools having a {100} cutting plane and <110> cutting direction resulted in considerably lower tool wear and surface roughness values, to that of tools with similar cutting plane orientation and <100> cutting direction.