Development of a Grinding Fluid Delivery Technique and Its Performance Evaluation

In grinding process, a stiff air layer is generated around the wheel due to rotation of porous grinding wheel at high speed. This stiff air layer restricts fluid to reach deep inside the grinding zone. Conventional method of fluid delivery system is not capable of penetrating this stiff air layer, and thus cannot control grinding temperature and thermal defects effectively. In this work, formation of stiff air layer has been studied experimentally by measuring the variation of air pressure around grinding wheel periphery at different conditions. A pneumatic barrier setup has been developed first time for restricting the stiff air layer around grinding wheel. It is found from analysis of variance (ANOVA) that both pneumatic barrier position and orientation have significant effects on suppressing air layer pressure around the grinding wheel. Using the pneumatic barrier, reduction of air pressure up to 53% has been observed experimentally. Hence, it reduces wastage of grinding fluid, leading to less environmental problem. Surface grinding experiments using the pneumatic barrier setup shows remarkable reduction in forces and surface roughness over flood cooling conditions expectedly due to better penetration of fluid in the grinding zone, showing its applicability.