Non-linear analysis and quench control of chatter in plunge grinding

• Grinding stability is analyzed by a continuation scheme.
• Grinding chatter is mostly induced by subcritical bifurcation.
• This instability can be transformed into the super critical by bifurcation control.
• Chatter amplitude can be further suppressed by quench control.
• Condition for quenching grinding chatter is found by the method of multiple scales.

This paper aims at mitigating regenerative chatter in plunge grinding. To begin with, a dynamic model is proposed to investigate grinding dynamics, where eigenvalue and bifurcation analyses are adopted, respectively, for prediction of grinding stability and chatter. Generally, it is found that most grinding chatter is incurred by subcritical Hopf bifurcation. Compared with supercritical instability, the subcritical generates coexistence of stable and unstable grinding in the stable region and increases chatter amplitude in the chatter region. To avoid these adverse effects of the subcritical instability, bifurcation control is employed, where the cubic non-linearity of the relative velocity between grinding wheel and workpiece is used as feedback. With the increase of feedback gain, the subcritical instability is transformed to be supercritical not only locally but also globally. Finally, the conditionally stable region is completely removed and the chatter amplitude is decreased. After that, to further reduce the chatter amplitude, quench control is used as well. More specifically, an external sinusoid excitation is applied on the wheel to quench the existing grinding chatter, replacing the large-amplitude chatter by a small-amplitude forced vibration. Through the method of multiple scales, the condition for quenching the chatter is obtained.