Modeling and Simulation of Process-Machine Interaction in Grinding of Cemented Carbide Indexable Inserts

Abstract

Interaction of process and machine in grinding of hard and brittle materials such as cemented carbide may cause dynamic instability of the machining process resulting in machining errors and a decrease in productivity. Commonly, the process and machine tools were dealt with separately, which does not take into consideration the mutual interaction between the two subsystems and thus cannot represent the real cutting operations. This paper proposes a method of modeling and simulation to understand well the process-machine interaction in grinding process of cemented carbide indexable inserts. First, a virtual grinding wheel model is built by considering the random nature of abrasive grains and a kinematic-geometrical simulation is adopted to describe the grinding process. Then, a wheel-spindle model is simulated by means of the finite element method to represent the machine structure. The characteristic equation of the closed-loop dynamic grinding system is derived to provide a mathematic description of the process-machine interaction. Furthermore, a coupling simulation of grinding wheel-spindle deformations and grinding process force by combining both the process and machine model is developed to investigate the interaction between process and machine. This paper provides an integrated grinding model combining the machine and process models, which can be used to predict process-machine interactions in grinding process.