Dressing of diamond grinding wheels by abrasive water jet for freeform optical surface grinding

During the ultra-precision grinding of a large aperture mirror made of RB-SiC, the grinding wheel becomes dull rapidly, which will lead to an increase of grinding force and a decrease of grinding ratio. In this paper, diamond grinding sticks were dressed with micro SiC abrasive water jet and water jet. Through single factorial experiments, the influence of jet pressure on the dressing performance was investigated. To analyze and evaluate the effect of dressing quantitatively, the 3D roughness and the wheel topography were measured and compared with laser scanning confocal microscope before and after dressing. The experimental results show that the abrasive grains are well protruded from binder and the distribution of the abrasive grains becomes uniform after dressing by abrasive water jet when the dressing parameters are properly selected. The dressing performance of abrasive water jet is much better than water jet. For dressing ultra-fine grit size wheels, the abrasive size of the jet should be smaller than the wheel grit size to achieve a better result. The jet pressure is an obvious influence factor of the surface topography.