Thermal failure of diamond tools indicated by diamond degradation: Damage evaluation and property prediction on small image datasets

High temperature induced diamond degradation often leads to the failure of diamond tools. In this work, diamond samples holding different degrees of thermal damage were prepared by heating and sintering. The influence of diamond particle size and processing temperature was investigated through mechanical testing and micromorphology observation, meanwhile, a dataset containing 2870 SEM images showing diamonds with different degrees of degradation was constructed. By modification of VGG16 network, classification models and regression models were developed for thermal damage evaluation and sample property prediction. Training strategies including transfer learning and data augmentation were implemented and verified essential on the small dataset, where drop-out showed no positive effects. Two classification models (3-class and 65-class) were constructed and trained for damage evaluation. Visualized damage feature maps exported from Grad-CAM revealed the influential mechanism of thermal damage on diamonds, which proved the effectiveness of the classification models as well. Under the optimized training strategies, regression models were built for sample property prediction. The models towards toughness index, bending strength loss, relative density and Rockwell hardness were examined. Comparing the output results with real property values in test sets, the first two models matched well, and the latter two showed the opposite. It verified the validity of the regression models for property prediction as they were all established based on diamond damage image datasets. The loss in bending strength loss prediction model was smaller than that of toughness index, indicating bending strength easier to be shorten than impact toughness for diamond/metal composites suffering thermal impacts.