Establishing a basis for sustainable re-use of cutting tools through laser decoating

There is an urgent and growing need to reduce the environmental footprints of products and manufacturing processes and to support sustainable material consumption. For engineering applications this implies the need to develop low energy/carbon footprint manufacturing processes tha utilise extended life tooling. In machining, nano-structured coatings can be used to extend service life of cutting tools. However, hard coatings pose a challenge to the re-shaping and re-use of tools. This work investigated the use and re-use of cutting tools by developing selective tool coating removal using laser and conventional chemical de-coating technology. The laser de-coated tools were re-coated and their machining performance was compared to that of chemical de-coated and re-coated tools as well as first generation coated and uncoated tools. The paper presents a comparison of the energy footprints associated with the re-use of tooling. It is concluded that high value tooling can exploit material re-use procedures.