Grinding wheel grooving: innovative and feasible solutions for Canadian manufacturing industries to adopt to significantly reduce costly grinding-burn-induced waste and increase productivity and reliability

The grinding manufacturing process is one of the most essential and costly manufacturing processes accounting for about 25% of the total machining expenditures in industrialized countries. Virtually every manufacturing company worldwide relies on the grinding process to create components with precise dimensions and high-quality surface finishes such as gears, bearings and shafts. Grinding, however, is near the end of the product manufacturing process where the cost of scrapping a workpiece component due to grinding thermal damage can be extremely high. While manufacturers endeavor to take deeper depths of cut at higher feed rates to try to maximize productivity, the risk of thermal damage causes many production grinding processes to be suboptimal with overly conservative process parameters determined by trial-and-error. Grinding research and expertise is, therefore, needed so that industry can optimize existing grinding processes and adopt new grinding technologies. The grinding process is of strategic importance to the Canadian economy because it is critical to myriad industries including automotive, aerospace, shipbuilding, defense, medical, energy, food, electronics and mining - yet there are remarkably few grinding researchers in Canada. To address these needs, the long-term objectives of my research program are to develop new grinding technologies that can be transferred to Canadian industry to enhance productivity, reliability and quality. For example, my research enabled a prominent Canadian aerospace manufacturing company to significantly increase their productivity by applying novel coherent-jet coolant delivery techniques to their grinding processes - reducing their scrap rate in less than a year by 50%. My research has discovered that grinding with a spiral-shaped groove inscribed around the wheel surface can dramatically improve grinding efficiency, reliability and productivity by reducing grinding forces and power (which can lead to thermal damage) by ~50% and enabling up to 300% more material to be removed. The actual process of creating a groove on a grinding wheel, however, is problematic so industry has not adopted this promising technology. Therefore, the short-term objectives of my research program are to: 1. develop and explore the use of a new rotary diamond dresser grooving system to create groove patterns on flat and profiled conventional and super-abrasive grinding wheels as a feasible, practical and desirable solution for Canadian industry to adopt 2. develop and validate essential grinding computer simulation tools to determine optimal wheel grooving geometries, speed ratios and process parameters I have a solid track record of success in this field and the proposed highly-innovative grinding research will make significant advances in grinding technology and create Canadian expertise through the training of highly-qualified personnel in this precision machining process.