Pulse Dressing in Creep Feed Grinding
Machining of the roots and shrouds of turbine blades is normally performed by continuous dress creep feed grinding. In this process, the grinding wheel is continuously dressed during the grinding operation, maintaining constant grinding forces and form accuracy. However, continuous-dressing has incurred higher wheel usage. In the tests described in this paper, creep feed grinding of nickel-base alloys was initially performed by continuous dressing to determine the burn barrier and the optimum dresser infeed rate. Pulse dressing, whereby the wheel is kept sharp by a series of dressing pulses, was then applied throughout the grinding cycle in such a way that the grinding forces were kept below the burn barrier. It was shown that wheel usage was reduced by a factor of two with the pulse dressing method. The effect of different grinding coolants under continuous and pulse dressing conditions is also discussed.