Experimental analysis of an adhesive surface grinding process

A peripheral adhesive grinding process has been developed to strip hardened adhesive from a gripper after work-piece de-bonding. The objective of this investigation was to gain insight into how changes in feed, depth of cut, and grinding speed affect the specific grinding energy of the process during the roughing phase. A variety of experiments were carried out on a simplified, surface grinding analog in which grinding forces, grinding wheel temperature, and grinding zone temperature were measured.The most important finding is that during grinding, wheel temperature can rapidly grow higher than the glass transition temperature of the adhesive. This can cause the temperature of the adhesive in front of the advancing grind zone to exceed the glass transition temperature as well. As a consequence, the behavior of the grinding process is very transient due to the continuous drop in grinding stiffness and specific grinding energy.The results of this investigation also show that when the temperature of the adhesive within the grind zone is below the glass transition temperature, the specific grinding energy is insensitive to changes in cutting speed, but decreases significantly with significant increases in feed, regardless of grinding speed and steady state depth of cut. This sensitivity is most likely due to the size effect. The results also show that specific grinding energy decreases significantly with increases in depth of cut. This may also be due in small part to the size effect.