Development of Advanced Abrasive Electrical Discharge Grinding (AEDG) System for Machining Difficult-to-cut Materials

Abstract The paper reports the development of a new Abrasive Electrical Discharge Grinding (AEDG) system and investigations of performance characteristic of machining difficult-to-cut materials. Developed machining system allows to perform following machining processes: conventional grinding, AEDG process and conventional grinding with in-situ EDM grinding wheel dressing. The first section of this paper describes thermal model to analyze the self-dressing phenomenon in AEDG. In the second part, the modular abrasive-electro-discharge grinding machine with adaptive control system is presented. There are also presented basic performance characteristics of the machining system achieved during machining of cutting tools made of PCD compacts sintered on WC base. Presented machining system MESO 25 CNC allows performance of all operations needed for production or regeneration of cutting tools with complex geometries. It is worth to notice that operations of rough and finishing machining can be performed with the machining system using single clamping.