Friction improvement via grinding wheel texturing by dressing

Abstract

The economic and environmental cost of friction in machinery and transport is significantly remarkable, the machine tool being one of the most affected. In this sector, the movements are fully affected by the friction originated in the displacements between the guideways and the slides, which results in terms of precision, energy consumption and component deterioration. In this line, texturing has proved to be a useful tool to lessen friction. Nowadays, flaking is the technique in use for the texturing of machine tool guideways, a manual and costly process in which the final finish of the workpiece is not controllable. Other techniques like laser texturing constitute an effective and precise procedure which is at the same time expensive, requires fine tuning of process parameters and is not applicable in large workpieces. Therefore, the main challenge is to develop an industry-implemented technique capable of producing textures in a repetitive and economically viable way. In this work, a method that allows generating a wide range of controlled textures by grinding with wheels textured with an assisted dressing device is presented. With this technique it is possible to create textures in large workpieces, such as machine tool guideways and to do it in a repetitive way and in the same machine in which the guide has been ground previously, which involves a reduction in time and costs. The technique has been validated by means of tribological tests in which textures generated with this technique have obtained lower friction coefficients than flaking.