Experimental study on internal cylindrical grinding of bearing steel with electrolytic in-process dressing grinding

Precision cylindrical surfaces have attracted considerable attention and interest, due to the continual pursuit of perfect quality and high-performance products. Especially in bearing industry, high-performance bearing often requires specific cylindrical surface properties such as high hardness, wear resistance, high strength, and toughness, because it is normally used in poor working environment. Besides, it is usually finished to a mirror-like surface for higher chemical stability. Most of enterprises adopt bearing steel to manufacture bearing components. However, the bearing steel is known to be difficult to finish a mirror-like surface in conventional grinding, owing to its high hardness. Electrolytic in-process dressing (ELID) grinding has been proven as an effective grinding process especially for hard and brittle materials. In this paper, ELID grinding technique was used to obtain a better surface and accuracy on bearing steel. A series of experiments were done to study a law of craft parameters’ influence on the internal cylindrical surface quality with ELID grinding. The experimental results show that ELID grinding method can realize a stable grinding process to produce internal cylindrical grinding surface of bearing steel. The optimization of process parameters with respect to ground surface roughness is analyzed by design of experiments.