Use of actively cooled and activated coolant for surface quality improvement in ductile material grinding

An active cooling and activation approach for coolant during ductile material grinding is proposed and examined. The aim is to enhance the surface quality of the workpiece being machined by the grinding process. Problems in the existing cooling approaches, such as activation, cryogenic cooling and chilled air-cooling, are discussed. Experimental and computational studies of the effects of actively cooled and activated coolant for ductile material grinding were conducted. Experimental results show that the proposed approach is able to improve the surface quality by up to 36.68% on average in terms of surface roughness Ra. In addition, it was found that surface roughness could be reduced if the coolant temperature is reduced. The results of the X-Ray Diffraction (XRD) tests show that the proposed method could, in general, produce low residual stress values. Further studies of this topic are necessary. Results of optical and Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) examinations also confirmed that the proposed approach is advantageous.