Study on methods of enhancing the quality, efficiency, and accuracy of pulsed laser profiling

• Graphitization is unavoidable when using a long laser pulse.
• By blowing argon, the profiling quality can be improved.
• Higher laser peak power resulted in higher profiling efficiency.
• Increasing the peak power or the overlapped rate enhanced the profiling accuracy.
• After laser profiling, the total surface profile error was reduced to 10.6 μm.

A pulsed fiber laser was employed in a systematic study on the tangential profiling of a coarse-grained bronze-bond diamond grinding wheel. The goal of the present study was to improve the profile quality and enhance the efficiency and accuracy of the profiling process. Our results demonstrate that when using a long laser pulse, graphitization of the grain after profiling is unavoidable. However, by blowing argon from the side onto the surface during laser profiling, the degree of graphitization can be reduced, thereby improving the profiling quality. Higher laser peak power resulted in higher profiling efficiency. Only when the laser depth of cut was equal to the initial surface profile error of the grinding wheel, i.e., the “deep single layer cut, stepwise feeding tangential laser profiling method” was used, could the highest profiling efficiency be attained. Increasing the peak power of the laser or the overlapped rate of the laser scanning paths enhanced the profiling accuracy with no appreciable effect on the quality. After laser profiling, the initial circular runout and parallelism error of the surface of the grinding wheel were reduced from 83.1 and 324.6 μm to 6.8 and 3.8 μm, respectively. Because the peak power of the pulsed fiber laser was not sufficiently high, the surface profile accuracy of the grinding wheel was slightly lower than the profile accuracy using the diamond wheel.