Study on surface/subsurface breakage in ultrasonic assisted grinding of C/SiC composites

Continuous carbon fiber reinforced silicon carbide ceramic matrix composites (C/SiC) are promising materials in aerospace and space optical fields due to their excellent properties. However, poor machining quality resulted from surface/subsurface breakage is hard to meet precision requirements of some components. With an objective to study surface/subsurface breakage formation mechanism and improve machining quality of C/SiC composites, ultrasonic assisted grinding (UAG) and conventional grinding (CG) tests with a defined diamond grain distribution brazed grinding wheel were conducted. The surface/subsurface breakage types and formation mechanism were studied by comparative analysis of grinding force, micro-morphology of grinding surface/subsurface, and ground surface roughness. The results showed that main breakage types of different angle fibers in ground surface were lamellar brittle fracture and pit group originating from fracture and pullout of fibers, while breakage types of different angles fibers in ground surface were brittle fracture. Compared to CG, these breakages were reduced by UAG in varying degrees because it can reduce grinding force that determined fiber breakage. Consequently, because of the lower fiber breakages, the ground surface roughness Sa obtained by UAG was lower than CG and the maximum reduction was 12%.