This chapter presents a general characteristic of sintered tool materials, in particular sintered sialons, nitride ceramics, injection-moulded ceramic-metallic tool materials and cemented carbides and a general characteristic of their surface treatment technology and especially chemical vapour deposition (CVD) and physical vapour deposition (PVD) techniques. The results of our investigations in technology foresight methods concerning the development prospects of surface engineering of sintered tool materials are presented. In the next subsection, we discuss the outcomes of multifaceted research carried out with advanced materials engineering methods, including high-resolution transmission electron microscopy, into the structure and properties of multicomponent, graded and multilayer coatings on the investigated tool materials, including the newly developed injection moulded ceramic-metallic tool materials. Special attention was drawn to a one-dimensional structure of the studied PVD and CVD coatings and its impact on the properties of coatings.Keywords: sintered tool materials, foresight, surface engineering, PVD, CVD, coatings, nanostructure
General characteristic of sintered tool materialsPowder metallurgy has found widespread applications in the manufacture of sintered tool materials. Rapidly evolving techniques and technologies necessitate higher demands for sintered tool materials in terms of mechanical properties, among others wear resistance. Advanced sintered tool materials are witnessing constant advancements connected with fast © 2017 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.progress in materials engineering. Advanced sintered tool materials, due to the character of their work and complex wear mechanisms to which cutting tool edges are subjected, should satisfy numerous requirements including, in particular, high hardness, high impact strength, resistance to complex wear (adhesive, diffusive, abrasive and thermal wear) and to high temperatures, high compressive strength, stretching, flexing and bending, high fatigue and thermal strength, good conductivity and thermal capacity, cutting edge stability and good ductility [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]. A tool material with universal applications should merge the mentioned properties as far as possible and especially the highest wear resistance and hardness with high strength and good ductility accompanied by chemical inertness towards the workpiece. Despite the intensive development of materials engineering, a tool material has still not been produced which fulfil such requirements due to a fundamental contradiction between such properties as hardness and ductility.As mentioned in the Introduction section, in general-in the group of sintered tool materialsone can distinguish super hard sintered materials, mixe...