Recently, the demand for micromachining of hard materials has been increasing. Machining microholes, grooves, and structures in hard materials such as tungsten carbide is very difficult. In this study, the machining characteristics of a microdisk tool for microgroove machining of tungsten carbide were studied. Microtools made of polycrystalline diamond (PCD) were fabricated using wire electrical discharge grinding (WEDG) to machine high-hardness tungsten carbide. Rectangular and V-shaped disk tools were fabricated by WEDG with controlled wire paths. In the micro grooving of tungsten carbide, the effects of capacitance and feedrate on the surface roughness of microgrooves and the wear of disk tools were studied. As the capacitance and feed rate decreased, the surface roughness decreased and no significant wear was observed in the PCD tool. However, an increase in tool edge radius of several micrometers was observed.

The WC-5wt.% TiC compacts, which was fabricated by pulsed current activated sintering process (PCAS), were cryogenically treated to improve the mechanical performance. The densely consolidated specimens were exposed to liquid nitrogen for 6, 12, and 24 h. All cryogenically treated samples exhibited compressive stress in the sintered body compared with the untreated sample. The cryogenically treated samples exhibited significant improvement in mechanical properties, with a 9% increase in Vickers hardness and a 52.6% decrease in the fracture toughness compared with the untreated samples. However, excessive treatment of over 12 h deteriorates the mechanical properties due to tensile stress in the specimens. Therefore, the cryogenic treatment time should be controlled precisely to obtain mechanically enhanced hard materials.

The tungsten carbide is a material with high hardness, wear resistance, good chemical stability, and dimensional stability. Because of these characteristics, it is mainly used as a tool for cutting and molding such as molds, and casts required for manufacturing high value-added equipment such as automobile parts and medical equipment. However, it is difficult to process with the traditional machining methods because of the high toughness and hardness. To overcome these problems, a study of tungsten carbide machining processing using the ultrafast-laser was recently conducted. In this paper, the ultrafast lasers with the pulse duration of 190 fs, 5 and 10 ps, respectively, were used. When the experiments were conducted with pulse widths of 5 and 10 ps, respectively, micro-cracks were observed from the heat generated by the overlap of the laser pulses. Conversely, the machining processing using a laser with the pulse width of 190 fs showed a major advantage with no crack by minimizing the thermal effects.