Effect of grinding fluid supply on workpiece temperature in continuous generating grinding

摘要

Continuous generating grinding (CGG) has been widely used as a highly efficient and precise finishing process for gears. However, due to the significant heat generation, it is necessary to supply a large amount of grinding fluid. Usually more power is consumed by the supplying system than is consumed by the processing machine itself. In industry, unnecessarily large amount of grinding fluid tends to be supplied in CGG since the influence of the supply rate on grinding temperature has not been clarified based on the basic mechanism of grinding fluid action. We have developed an on-site temperature measuring system to directly measure the grinding temperature in CGG. With this system, we were able to capture the instantaneous temperature rise. The effect of the grinding fluid supply on the temperature of the region of removal was investigated by the developed system with different rates of grinding fluid supply as 80 L/min, 140 L/min and 200 L/min. The results showed that increase of grinding fluid supply does not affect the peak temperature. The results indicated that the lubrication effect of grinding fluid was not influenced by the different supply rates in the range of 80 - 200 L/min. In addition, the peak temperature was highly affected by the depth of removal of each abrasive grit. The peak temperature varied since protrusion of each grit on grinding wheel has large variations. In addition to the peak temperature, the integrated temperature was also investigated. The results indicated that the larger amount of grinding fluid was revealed to remove the heat more efficiently in the cooling phase which follows the material removal phase. Eventually we investigated the behavior of the base temperature, which showed that the base temperature is increased when the supply rate was reduced. The overall results indicated that the lubrication effect of grinding fluid was not affected by the supply rate. However, the cooling effect of grinding fluid was affected by the supply rate. The results provided the basic knowledge of the effect of the supply rate of grinding fluid on grinding temperature in CGG, which would contribute to realization of damage-free processes with less amount of supply.