There is a video of someone who cuts a circle out of a regular A4 paper. He then spins up this circle using the motor of a circle saw working bench. He shows that this thin, soft paper circle is able to cut through rather material harder than itself.
I am doing a research project where the idea is to take a Si wafer and add a layer of amorphous SiC, somewhere in the range of 20 to 100 nm thick. After adding this layer the idea is to etch of a few micrometres (somewhere in the order of 50 micrometres) of the Si wafer's radius along the whole circumference. That way the SiC layer will stick out as a sort of knife edge. The whole blade will probably have a radius in the range of 10-25 mm. The idea is to spin up this wafer and try to find out if the same principle of the paper blade being able to cut much harder material than itself, due to its very high RPM, will allow the SiC to cut much harder material on a nanoscale, perhaps diamond or even theoretically harder material.
Amorphous SiC is chosen because recent research has shown that it can reach the highest ultimate tensile strength ever measured for a nanostructured amorphous material.1
I am trying to figure out what material removal mechanisms are present in the video and more important, what mechanism might allow my SiC layer to cut harder material than itself.
In my research I've read a lot about abrasive cutting, for instance ultra-thin diamond dicing. Where blades with a thickness of 20 micrometer and RPM of several 10 000's are not uncommon. However, in these blades hard abrasive particles like diamond are used to penetrate and remove very small amounts of the softer workpiece material. This might be the mechanism which allows paper to cut the harder material, as paper can contain hard particles. However, I do not think this principle might allow my SiC layer to cut harder material than itself, as there are no hard abrasive particles present.
So what does possibly happen when a amoprhous SiC blade with a 20 to 100 nm thickness spinning a 10 000 - 60 000 RPM touches a hard (and brittle) material, possibly harder than itself? What material removal mechanism might take place and how would that depend on variables like the rotational speed? These are all questions I am trying to answer in this first stage of my research because I want to develop an understanding of the physics of cutting. Especially cutting harder materials than the cutting tool itself.
1 Xu, M., Shin, D., Sberna, P. M., van der Kolk, R., Cupertino, A., Bessa, M. A., & Norte, R. A. (2023). High‐Strength Amorphous Silicon Carbide for Nanomechanics. Advanced Materials, 36(5). https://doi.org/10.1002/adma.202306513
