Experimental investigation on materials removal mechanism during grinding silicon carbide ceramics with single diamond grain

A single grain grinding experiment with fixed speed ratio vs/vw was designed to decouple the effect of grinding speed and undeformed chip thickness (UCT) on the SiC material removal mechanism during elevating the grinding wheel speed. Ground surface and subsurface topography, grinding forces, and specific energy were measured with grinding speed ranging from 20 to 160 m/s and maximum UCT agmax from 0.02 to 3 μm. The results demonstrated the grinding force and specific grinding energy show an evident decreased tendency with the increasing of grinding speed, despite the agmax value was kept at 0.03, 1 μm. However, at agmax = 0.3 μm, the grinding force has a peak value with the increment of grinding wheel speed. The subsurface has the same trend. Based on the subsurface morphologies, grinding forces, grinding energy, the critical grinding wheel speeds vs = 100, 80, 80 m/s were determined at the agmax = 0.03, 0.3, 1 μm, respectively. Besides, grinding forces show different growth rates with the gradually increasing agmax at three stages under typical grinding speeds due to the transition of material removal mechanism. The critical agmax values for ductile-brittle transition and beginning of brittle regime grinding are determined as 0.3 and 1 μm by surface and subsurface morphologies, grinding forces, grinding energy, respectively.