Development of an automated system to evaluate the surface condition of grinding wheels

This thesis describes the development of an automated system to evaluate the surface condition of grinding wheels. The system was named FASCAT, which is an acronym for "Fully Automated Grinding Wheel Surface Condition Analysis Tool".; Grinding is a time-varying process affected by factors such as wheel construction, dressing parameters, operating parameters, work piece material and cooling. The evaluation of the wheel condition is performed by the measurement of wear flats on the wheel surface. Wear flats form on the abrasive grains as the wheel wears and they are good indicators of the wheel condition.; FASCAT is mounted on the grinding machine and automates wear flat measurement by using computer control to automatically position the wheel and capture digital images of the wheel between grinding cycles. Image processing software is used to automatically identify and measure the wear flats from the digital images.; The results obtained using FASCAT were validated using existing methods to measure wear flats. Experiments were also performed on a Brown & Sharpe Micromaster 824 surface grinder to examine the relationship between wear flat area and normal force. The results agree with the literature. Finally, wear flat evolution was studied by taking a sequence of images of the same abrasive grit as it wore.