Zirconia ceramic top comb processing methods and common problems

Ceramic top comb, also known as ceramic top teeth and ceramic upright comb. It is a main component of the straight combing machine. The top comb is raised during combing and cylinder combing, and lowered when separating the beard clumps to comb the ends of the fibrous beard clumps that have been combed by the cylinder. The position should be close to the extraction skin plate (coat roller) in the extraction stage, and the spacing should be 0.5~1mm to ensure that the part of the fiber beard that has not been combed by the cylinder can be combed by the top comb.

Among the zirconia ceramic processing methods, the mechanical processing method has high efficiency and is widely used in industry. In particular, diamond grinding wheel grinding, grinding and polishing are more common. Most other processing methods of zirconia ceramics are suitable for drilling, cutting or micro-machining. When cutting, diamond grinding wheels are mostly used for grinding and cutting. When drilling, ultrasonic processing, grinding or grinding are performed according to different apertures.

Zirconia ceramic top comb (picture source: Mingrui Ceramics)

Main issues in zirconia ceramic processing

1. Although there are many methods for processing zirconia ceramics, the processing costs are high, the processing efficiency is low, and the processing accuracy is poor. One of the main reasons for this is that ceramics are very hard. For the green body or calcined body of zirconia ceramics, cutting is mainly used for rough processing, and grinding is used for finishing after sintering.

2. Depending on the conditions of the zirconia ceramics, the sintered body can also be directly ground and processed without processing to achieve the design accuracy. As far as the processing process is concerned, zirconia ceramics are almost similar to metal parts, but the processing consequences of cobalt oxide ceramics are much larger. When rough machining of unfired or calcined ceramics, insufficient strength or surface processing defects are prone to occur, or the required final processing shape cannot be obtained due to insufficient clamping and other reasons. Since shrinkage cannot be maintained uniformly during sintering, the size must not be too close to the final size during rough machining, so there is a large margin left for finishing. For metal processing, finishing allowances such as thermal deformation and black scale produced by heat treatment are considered. A few hundredths of millimeters should be left as much as possible. For ceramic processing, the finishing allowance needs to be several millimeters or even tens of millimeters. Large machining allowance, reduced productivity, and increased production costs.

Zirconia ceramic top comb (picture source: Mingrui Ceramics)

3. Another problem in the processing of zirconia ceramics is the high cost of processing tools. High-priced sintered diamond and CBN tools are required for cutting processing, and diamond grinding wheels are mainly used for finishing. Therefore, the tool cost is dozens of times higher than the tools used for metal cutting. to a hundred times. The strength of zirconia ceramics is sensitive to processing conditions, and it is difficult to achieve high-efficiency processing. Therefore, the processing cost of zirconia ceramics is much higher than that of ordinary materials.