Correlating surface roughness and vibration on plunge cylindrical grinding of steel

Abstract Since the wear of a grinding wheel has a direct effect on the workpiece vibration and both have effect on the workpiece quality, the main goal of this work is to study the relation between the process vibration signals and the workpiece quality (mean roughness, circularity and burning) as the grinding wheel gets worn, in an attempt to use these signals to decide the exact moment to dress the wheel. In order to reach this goal, several experiments were carried out in a plunge cylindrical grinding operation of an AISI 52100 quenched and tempered steel, having as input variables the dressing overlap ratio, the spark out time and the workpiece velocity. The output variables were the workpiece surface roughness and circularity and also the process vibration during both, the cutting phase and the spark out phase of the grinding cycle. The main conclusions were: (1) it is possible to have good workpiece quality even with a vibration level much higher than that obtained with a recently dressed wheel; (2) vibration during cutting phase and at the end of complete spark out can be used to monitor the wheel condition at least when high dressing overlap ratio is used; and (3) the decrease in the spark out time makes the vibration at the end of spark out increase a lot, but does not cause such a damage in surface roughness. This fact makes the use of partial spark out feasible in some situations.