Benefits of Titanium Carbo-Nitride Coating

A protective coating is a common application on cutting tools used in the manufacturing industry. The right coating may prolong tool life and improve the performance of tools. It’s a cost-effective way to optimize your tool for the material you’re working with and the operation you’re performing.
Using a vacuum chamber process called physical vapor deposition, or PVD, different combinations of materials are applied to cutting tools to coat them for specific performance benefits. We give an overview of various cutting tool coatings in a separate post, but let’s look closely at one carbon-enhanced coating.

Titanium Carbo-Nitride Coating

Titanium Carbo-Nitride (TiCN) is a protective tool coating that’s one step up from Titanium Nitride (TiN). By adding carbon to this titanium-based coating, cutting tool surfaces have a lower coefficient of friction and increased hardness. That increased lubricity improves cutting performance overall and helps remove chips from the cutting area. 

TiCN Advantages

The operating temperature of TiCN is lower than that of TiN, and that means TiCN-coated tools should be used with a coolant in high-temperature machining operations. The TiCN coating is ideal for cutting aluminum or steel alloy material, especially when it’s applied to tools that have sharp edges and corners, such as end mills and dovetail cutters.

The Right Process

While choosing the right coating is important, it’s also critical to choose a cutting tool manufacturer with the knowledge and experience to apply any coating properly. MITGI offers several in-house coating options using processes that create the proper coating thickness for each tool, each time. When we apply coating to cutting tools, we batch tools of the same cutting diameter to apply the optimal amount of coating for the tool size. By coating our tools in-house, we can also make sure that the coated reamer we supply six months from now for your work, for example, will have the exact same coating thickness as the reamer you’re currently using. We know that coating thickness can impact the tool size, and we consider that when making our cutting tools.

We can apply TiCN tool coatings quickly, usually within a week or less. If you want to consult with experts on tool coatings, reach out to MITGI, and we will be happy to help you select the right coating for your application.