High-Efeiciency Creep-Feed Grinding of Advanced Ceramics

The application of advanced ceramics for mechanical parts is being increased. The grinding of advanced ceramics is however, quite difficult and inefficient due to their high degree of hardness and brittleness. Creep-feed grinding is well known as a practical method to attain high efficiency in profile grinding of difficult-to-machine metals. In this study, creep-feed grinding is applied for representative advanced ceramics, such as, Al2O3, SiC and Si3N4 The grindabilities of those materials are experimentally evaluated through the measurement of the grinding force, the surface roughness, the chipping size and the grinding ratio. Some proposals are made to solve adverse effects of creep-feed grinding, such as large grinding force, rapid increase in the grinding force and the occurrence of the grinding burn. The influence of the grinding fluids on the creep-feed grinding is also investigated. Results obtained in this study show that the segmented resinoid diamond wheel proposed in this study has an excellent grinding performance.