Substitution Of Carbide End Mills With Newly Developed Rock Flour-Based End Mills – A Life Cycle Assessment To Determine The Environmental Impact

Machining processes are used in almost every manufacturing company. In many production systems, particularly in the machine building and automotive industries, they even represent the largest proportion of manufacturing processes and therefore have a significant influence on economic and environmental targets. The cutting tools used on NC controlled machine tools are usually made of carbide materials, which are produced with high energy input and the use of critical raw materials. Even so, in mechanical engineering, there are several approaches to substituting carbides with mineral-based materials. These mineral-based materials have interesting mechanical properties such as high strength and good damping and are also highly available and inexpensive. Using the example of an end mill, this paper compares the ecological impact of carbide end mills in comparison to newly developed rock flour-based ones. A comparative life cycle assessment in accordance with the ISO 14040 and ISO 14044 standards is applied. To assess the manufacturing and utilisation phase in the life cycle, several rock flour-based end mills were manufactured and investigated in experimental studies. It is shown that the approach of using rock flour-based end mills is beneficial from an environmental point of view, even considering their lower performance compared to carbide end mills.