Experimental investigation on the feasibility of high-efficiency and precision grinding of silicon carbide ceramics with monolayer brazed diamond wheel

To explore the feasibility of high efficiency and precision grinding of brittle ceramics, the experimental grinding tests were conducted on SiC ceramics with monolayer brazed diamond wheels. The monolayer diamond grinding wheel with 80/100 mesh size diamond grains was brazed using high-frequency induction techniques. The binarization method was proposed to quantitatively characterize the brittle removed areas from the whole ground surface and oblique polishing method was used to assess the subsurface damage depth of the ground SiC samples. The results show that the maximum undeformed chip thickness (agmax) plays a crucial role in the material removal mode. When agmax increases from 0.08 mu m to 1 mu m, the brittle-removal ratio increases rapidly from 8.20 % to 48.24 % and the subsurface damage depth increase from 3.48 mu m to 9.14 mu m by 162.6 %. The grinding wheel speed also has a significant influence on the brittle-removal ratio. With the gradual increase of grinding wheel speed (vs) from 20 m/s to 160 m/s, the brittle-removal ratio of the ground surface decreases from 34.24 % to 25.56 %, and the depth of subsurface damage decreases from 5.68 mu m to 3.58 mu m by 36.97 %. The effect of the grinding depth on the ground surface and subsurface is comparatively not remarkable. The influence of grinding parameters on the grinding process of SiC ceramics indicate that high speed, creep infeed and deep depth grinding method makes it possible to realize high efficiency and low damage machining for SiC ceramics with monolayer diamond wheel.