Design and development of spiral grooved grinding wheel and their influence on the performance of vertical surface grinding process

Abstract In surface grinding process, the insufficient coolant flow causes the accumulation of dislodged abrasives and chips in the grinding interfaces. It leads to poor performance by increased work-surface scratches and reduced material removal rate (MRR). This can be improved by enhancing the coolant flow in the grinding interfaces by creating grooves on grinding wheels surfaces. In this work, a vertical surface grinding process is employed to emphasize the influence of surface integrity of the work-piece with spiral grooved SiC grinding wheel surfaces. The grinding performance (force, power, MRR, wheel wear and G-ratio) and the surface characteristics (avg. roughness, peak-valley height and pitch value) were investigated by varying the process parameters (i.e., depth of cut = 16, 24, 32 and 40 μm and feed rate = 7 and 14 m/min at a constant speed of 1500 rpm). At first, the spiral grooves of four different patterns (Archimedes, Logarithmic, Fermat=t2 and radius=√t) were designed on wheel surfaces and investigated for the stress distribution with the centrifugal force (157 rad/s) by FEM analysis using ANSYS. It reveals that the stress-distribution was larger than the un-grooved wheel surface, irrespective of groove patterns. However, the stress-distribution was found to be lower in Archimedes spiral groove patterns compared to other patterns. Therefore, the case study on Archimedes spiral groove patterns on grinding wheels were performed and compared with the un-grooved wheels.