An investigation of the effects of wheel-cleaning parameters in creep-feed grinding

Grinding is an industrial process where an abrasive wheel is used to remove material from a workpiece to give precision finishes and close tolerances. The effectiveness of the grinding process is related to how sharp the grinding wheel is. A duller wheel will give a smoother surface finish, but is more prone to cause thermal damage to the workpiece if not properly cooled. When grinding, some of the material being cut may not be flushed away with the coolant and can get fused to the surface of the grinding wheel. This phenomenon, called wheel loading, can clog the pores of the grinding wheel and accelerate thermal damage to the workpiece. To help reduce wheel loading, separate cleaning-jet systems can be applied to the grinding process using a high-speed coolant stream directed towards the wheel surface. In the present study, the influence of speed, flowrate and orientation of the cleaning jet is examined. For the experimental conditions used in this work, the results show that cleaning-jet orientation does not appear to have a significant effect on the grinding process; however, a threshold for the speed and flowrate of the cleaning jet was observed. Furthermore, with wheel cleaning, the authors observed an increase in the critical specific material removal rate of up to 100% and a corresponding decrease in the critical specific energy by 33% compared with experiments with no wheel cleaning. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.