Experimental and theoretical investigation of force distribution in the grinding contact zone

An experimental approach and an analytical procedure have been developed for the prediction of the force distribution in the grinding wheel and the workpiece contact zone. Additionally, a numerical analysis using finite element methods was carried out to verify the force distribution in the actual grinding cases. This work was motivated by the need to obtain the maximum force acting on individual active abrasive grains for establishing the probability of grain fracture and pullouts due to this force.;For the analytical prediction of the force distribution, a CBN grinding wheel and the workpiece were modeled using Solidworks, and the interaction between abrasive grains and the workpiece were simulated individually for a few revolutions of the wheel to predict the uncut chip geometries. The forces corresponding to the active grains in the contact arc were calculated from the uncut chip geometries, using which the force distributions were predicted. The predicted force distributions from the analytical and the experimental techniques were found to match very well. Furthermore, using DEFORM 3D, numerical analyses were carried out on single grain and multiple grains grinding cases to predict the force distributions. In the multiple grains case, the spatial and height distributions of the grains were considered random. The predicted force distributions confirmed the trends predicted by the experimental and analytical cases.;In the experimental approach, forces were measured while grinding small segments of the full wheel-workpiece contact length. The measured forces were used to predict the forces corresponding to smaller segments of the full contact arc to obtain the force distribution. To illustrate the method, forces were measured for four different grinding conditions using a 60 grit CBN grinding wheel with a small segment of the nickel alloy (IN718) workpiece. The predicted force distributions were found to increase at a decreasing rate from the bottom to the top of the contact arc in all four cases. Further the force distributions were applied to predict the transient grinding power. The predicted power values were found to match very well with the measured values in all four cases.