Use of surface roughness measurements to improve the estimation of the heat partition in grinding

In grinding, the heat partition is used to estimate the percentage of energy entering the workpiece which makes it possible to estimate grinding temperatures. In this work, a correlation was observed between surface roughness and the heat partition when grinding 1018 steel with an 80 grit aluminum oxide wheel. This correlation was used to improve the usability of a popular heat partition model by making it easier to estimate the grain radius, which is an important parameter in this model. The grain radius is used to account for the grinding wheel surface topography and is virtually impossible to directly measure in practice. To validate the proposed model, infrared temperature measurements along with 3D finite element simulations were used to determine the heat partition for different dressing conditions and techniques. For the experimental conditions used in this research, the measurements and simulations confirmed that one can use surface roughness to estimate the grain radius. The average difference between the heat partition predicted using the proposed model and the conventional approach was 7.5%, while the resulting maximum grinding temperatures predicted using the proposed model agreed with infrared temperature measurements to within 5%.