Numerical and experimental studies on the grinding of cemented carbide with textured monolayer diamond wheels

Abstract Textured grinding wheels could provide more excellent grinding performances than conventional grinding wheels, which have been experimentally confirmed. However, for lack of in-depth understandings of the grains-workpiece micro contact and interactions, experimental methods can only obtain the macro grinding performances, and the key issues on textured grinding wheels cannot be experimentally explained. In this paper, the combination method of numerical analysis and experiment is proposed. The experiments are conducted to evaluate the machining performances of grinding wheels from a macro level. Meanwhile, numerical methods are used to analyze the distribution characteristics of undeformed chip thickness in micro cutting process. The effects of material removal rate, texture dimension (TD) and radial dressing of grinding wheels on the distribution characteristics of undeformed chip thickness are revealed. The strong correlations between the macro grinding performances and the distribution characteristics of undeformed chip thickness are proved, and what kind of distribution characteristics are beneficial to good grinding results can be discerned, which provides a theoretical basis for tool optimization. Then, optimization strategy and steps of grinding performances are proposed. A conventional grinding wheel with same geometric parameters and grain size is used as reference grinding wheel, and the distribution of undeformed chip thickness generated in stable wear stage by the reference grinding wheel is taken as optimization starting point. After optimization, a desired distribution of undeformed chip thickness can be obtained. Finally, grinding experiments are conducted to confirm the optimization effects. In this way, using the distribution characteristics of undeformed chip thickness as a pointer, the deeper understanding of key issues on textured grinding wheel will be reached.