Virtual high performance grinding with CBN wheels

The development of future products requires designing, manufacturing, and testing components in a virtual environment before hardware parts are actually made. This paper presents a generalized process simulation and multi-constraint optimization strategy for five-axis grinding with cubic boron nitride (CBN) wheels to increase material removal rates while avoiding process problems such as damage to the machined surfaces and premature wheel failure. The wheel–workpiece engagement conditions under five-axis grinding are extracted from a CAM system by geometrically processing the NC program, the wheel geometry and the part geometry. The interpreted geometric contact data are used in combination with empirical grinding models to predict physical process parameters such as forces, power, heat flux, and temperature. These parameters are then used as the decision variables in a multi-constraint optimization to optimize process parameters such as workspeed to reduce cycle time.