Machinability Evaluation of Engineering Ceramics with Digraph Method

A new method is proposed for machinability comprehensive evaluation of engineering ceramic materials based on digraph theory. Machinability attributes of the materials are taken as the nodes and the correlations between attributes are taken as the edges. The digraph model for machinability evaluation of ceramics is set up. According to the diagraph model, the machinability attribute matrix was constituted. Then machinability indexes of ceramic materials were calculated with permanent function and machinabilities of the ceramics were evaluated. In this paper, mechanical property parameters of ceramic materials, including hardness, fracture toughness and elastic modulus, were selected as machinability attributes. Machinability of four typical engineering ceramics were evaluated and ranked with machinability indexes. The grinding experiments give further proof of evaluation results.