Kinematic modeling of surface topography ground by an electroplated diamond wheel

This paper presents a three-dimensional kinematic simulation of surface topography ground by a D301 electroplated diamond wheel. For an individual cubo-octahedron diamond grain, its cutting process is modeled by decomposing it into active grain edges and discrete cutting points. By successively integrating the material removal caused by all the grains, the ground surface topography of workpiece is successfully predicted. The predicted surface roughness is close to the theoretical and experimental values with relative errors of − 7.9% and − 3.3% for aluminum and fused silica, respectively. The study reveals that the other amplitude parameters, e.g., kurtosis and skewness, of surface profiles can reflect the material removal mechanisms. The lateral pile-up of plastic aluminum alloy in grinding increases the kurtosis while the fracture of brittle fused silica results in a prominently negative skewness. For a fresh grinding wheel, the surface roughness Ra reaches a plateau after a rapid increase as the grinding depth increases to 1.25 times the SD of the grain protrusion heights. By contrast, the effects of grinding depth on the surface topography are negligible when the wear depth is beyond a certain value. As the feed rate increases, the number of active abrasive grains gradually increases. Meanwhile, the effect of the grain circumferential distribution on the workpiece surface topography becomes significant.