Wear of diamond wheels in creep-feed grinding of ceramic materials I. Mechanisms

Abstract The main objective of this paper is to study and quantify the wheel wear mechanisms in creep-feed grinding of ceramic materials with diamond wheels. A resin-bonded diamond wheel was selected for this study. Nine different states of wheel working surface were generated by grinding specified volumes of a selected silicon nitride material. It is found that: (1) the roughness of wheel profile decreased quickly and stayed about the same after approximately 30 cm 3 volume of material removal; (2) diamond grits experienced attritious wear, grit fracture, and grit dislodgment; (3) the wheel wear mechanism was dominated by grit dislodgment in the first 2 cm 3 volume of material removal and by attritious wear thereafter; (4) grit density per unit area can be expressed as an exponential decay function of cumulative volume removal. The percentage of each wear mechanism was obtained by tracing grits in the same area after 2.1, 4.2, 7.4, and 10.6 cm 3 volume of material removal using the lead-tape imprint technique.