Research on the Grinding Performance of an Electroplated Coarse-Grained Diamond Grinding Wheel by Dressing

Abstract

The coarse-grained electroplated diamond grinding wheels is increasingly favored in precision grinding of hard and brittle materials owing to its high material removal efficiency, high wear resistance and steady surface contour accuracy. However, how to determine whether the dressed grinding wheel surface topography can achieve the desired precision ground surface quality is still a huge challenge to this day. In this paper, a novel numerical simulation model, which was established basing on the statistical features of actual electroplated coarse-grained diamond grinding wheel and the kinetics of the grinding process, was proposed for theoretically and thoroughly studying the influence of the surface dressing depth of coarse-grained electroplated diamond grinding wheel on ground workpiece surface morphology. At first, the statistical features of actual electroplated coarse-grained diamond grinding wheel was acquired and a novel numerical grinding wheel surface model was established. Subsequently, a numerical ground workpiece surface simulation model was also developed. And then, the evolving mechanism of the grinding wheel surface topography with the dressed wheel surface abrasive grain protrusion height was theoretically studied by numerical simulation. Moreover, the influence of the wheel surface abrasive grain protrusion height on the ground surface roughness was thoroughly researched by means of theoretical model and experiments. The simulation and experiments results in this paper indicated that precision ground workpiece surface with nano-scale surface roughness can be acquired by grinding with a dressed grinding wheel with a certain abrasive grain protrusion height of 25% of the typical abrasive size. Comparing with the undressed grinding wheel (grinding wheel with original surface topography and not be dressed), the surface roughness Sa and Sq of the surface ground with a well-dressed wheel can achieving a significant decrease of 97.75–99.77% and 97.57–99.73%, respectively. Therefore, carefully dressing the electroplated coarse-grained diamond grinding wheel is of great significance for obtaining a precision ground workpiece surface quality.