Optimisation of grinding parameters for wheel loading and dressing

Grinding is a finishing process often used to produce desired surface roughness with required precision and quality. The performance of grinding wheel significantly depends on the nature of the wheel, morphology of the abrasive grits and the grinding parameters namely speed, feed and depth of cut. As the wheel is performing its grinding operation, its cutting surface is being loaded with metal particles of the workpiece. This wheel loading also affects the surface finish of the workpiece. Hence monitoring the grinding wheel loading and dressing at proper time intervals becomes mandatory to get the desired surface finish. In the quest of developing a low cost monitoring system, it is good enough to analyse the wheel loading on widely used metal specimens such as mild steel, HCHCr steel and aluminium under optimised cutting conditions using the conventional silicon carbide and aluminium oxide wheels for better evaluation of the results. In this work the grinding parameters are optimised by using ANOVA technique. A full factorial experiment was carried out at 5% level of significance, i.e. at 95% confidence level.