Providing an increase in the working capacity of a metal-cutting tool, it is possible to significantly increase the productivity of mechanized labor, thereby reducing the cost of purchasing a new tool and saving on other accompanying technological components. During the operation of the cutting tool, the main load is transferred to its working part, this, as a rule, leads to partial wear or complete destruction of the planes and cutting edges. There are a number of technologies for processing working surfaces, which provides them with additional strengthening, the most effective of which is the method of applying special coatings to the surface of the cutting tool. Taking into account the specifics of the processes of formation of coatings, they can be divided into three main groups [1]. The first group includes methods in which the formation of coatings is carried out mainly due to diffusion reactions between saturating elements and structures of the instrumental material. The second group includes methods of forming coatings by a complex mechanism. The third group includes methods of forming coatings due to chemical and plasma-chemical reactions of particle flux simultaneously in volumes of space immediately adjacent to the saturable surfaces of the instrumental base. One such technology is the CIB (condensation and ion bombardment) method, which is a physical deposition of coatings. The most characteristic feature of coatings produced by this method is the absence of a transition zone between the coating and the tool material. This makes it possible to obtain a complex of properties on the working surfaces of the tool without deteriorating its original properties. The article is devoted to the issues of increasing the efficiency of ion-plasma technologies through the development and implementation of an automated system for analyzing and controlling the mass balance of reagent gases under conditions of several gases supply. Thus, the improvement of the technology of coating the working surfaces of the cutting tool, namely, the effective control of the process of applying ion-plasma coatings with the introduction of an automated system for analyzing and controlling the mass balance of reagent gases under conditions of supplying several gases is an urgent task.
The results of water droplet erosion tests of ion-plasma coatings formed on titanium Ti-6Al-4V alloy samples manufactured by using 3D-printing and traditional technological process