Material Removal and Wheel Wear Models for Robotic Grinding Wheel Profiling

In hydro turbine manufacturing and repair, grinding of certain high-curvature surfaces like fillet welds presently cannot be carried out by robots so hand grinding is necessary. During this process, the grinding wheel is moved back and forth over the workpiece and thus the wheel maintains its profile and better control of the material removal rate is achieved. To automate such a process, material removal and wheel wear models must be developed and experimentally validated under specific operating conditions. This paper presents the study of predictive models to support automation of grinding wheel profiling.