Applications of Continuous Dressing in Grinding Operations

It has been demonstrated that the use of continuous dressing, whereby the grinding wheel is kept continuously sharp throughout a grinding operation, can lead to increases in metal removal rates of the order of 20 times in the creep feed surface grinding of nickel based alloys. The application of continuous dressing to an “easy to grind” work-piece material in the cylindrical mode has also been investigated. This paper describes these two investigations and presents criteria for deciding which grinding processes should be considered as potential operations for the application of continuous dressing. It is proposed that such processes fall into two categories. The first category is that of operations which use a long arc of cut mode on a “difficult to grind” material. The second is that of operations which have inherently high wheel usage because of form retention requirements and which might show economic benefits from combining rough and finish grinding stages into one operation.