Research Projects

Grinding is a material removal process used to achieve close dimensional tolerances and a good surface finish. It has a reasonable material removal rate and is suitable for working with brittle and hard materials. Grinding is a heat-intensive process due to the interaction between the abrasives and bond with the worksurface. This process also has high specific energy requirements. The chips will take away most of the heat produced during machining operations, such as turning and milling. However, in the grinding process, most of the heat is conducted into the workpiece due to the lower specific heat capacity of the chips resulting from their small size. Higher temperatures could lead to poor surface finish, subsurface microstructural changes, burn marks, and crack over the work surface. An efficient cooling system could minimize these detrimental effects. Flood cooling, which refers to cooling using metal working fluids, is the most common and basic cooling technology. But due to issues with the usage and disposal of metal working fluids, the flood cooling technique has become the focus of increasing environmental and human welfare concerns in green or sustainable manufacturing. Therefore, the effectiveness and applicability of alternative cooling methods like dry grinding and grinding assisted by minimal quantity lubrication, which uses little or no fluids, are thoroughly investigated. Precooling-assisted dry machining involves cooling the workpiece before machining and has been the subject of promising research in other machining processes like turning and milling. The advantages of this technique have not, however, not been fully realized in grinding. A few works have been reported in grinding with the precooled workpieces. In this method, the workpiece was precooled by immersing it in a cryogenic medium just before grinding and placed on the worktable for grinding. However, it requires interrupting the grinding operation to precool the workpiece when necessary. Moreover, bulk cooling is not necessary as long as the grinding zone temperature is controlled. Hence, the dry grinding of precooled parts must be altered to facilitate continuous in-situ cooling and avoid the usage of cryogenic coolants. Therefore, this work proposes a novel in-situ cooling technique for the workpiece to allow continuous cooling without any fluids, thus allowing for industry-wide applications and boosting sustainability. The cooling performance of the proposed method will be quantified with the help of simulations and experiments by assessing the responses of the grinding process and the characteristics of the ground specimen. A comparison will be made with flood cooling to justify the benefits and limitations of the proposed cooling strategy. Further, the possible modifications to improve the method will be explored.