Preparation and performance of grinding wheel with orderly arranged abrasive particles based on laser processing technology

Abstract

Laser processing has its advantages of high energy density, good controllability and high flexibility; it has shown its importance in advancing modern manufacturing. Laser processing is used in this paper to fabricate an end grinding wheel with orderly arranged abrasive particles, and the performance of the fabricated grinding wheel is compared with that of a conventional grinding wheel. Our experiment and comparative studies have drawn the conclusions of (1) active laser brazing has been successfully used to arrange diamond particles in Archimedes’ spirals; (2) the resulted grinding wheel has shown the enhanced effectiveness in comparison with the conventional grinding wheel in terms of reduced grinding force; when the spiral change rate i is set 0.25, the tangential grinding force has been reduced by up to 60%; (3) for a grinding wheel with specific spiral change rate, ground debris are discharged from the grinding zone in a certain direction, and the grinding temperature can be reduced; (4) in high-speed grinding, the surface quality by the grinding wheel with orderly arranged abrasive particles is better than that of conventional grinding wheel; under the tested grinding conditions, the roughness of the ground surface has been reduced up to 47% of that by conventional grinding wheels; (5) the grinding wheel with orderly arranged abrasive particles has shown the better wear-resistance that conventional grinding wheels; abrasive particles of all four conventional grinding wheels are damaged to certain extent but orderly arranged abrasive particles on the fabricated wheel maintain mostly their protruded heights.