A study on the grinding of glass using electrolytic in-process dressing

Abstract

Grinding of brittle materials such as glass is gaining importance due to the rapid developments in the areas of machining of storage devices, microlenses, and optical communication devices. Grinding of such glasses is difficult because grinding wheels wear out easily due to the hard and brittle nature of the materials being machined. Grinding wheels with fine abrasive size are required in order to achieve ductile mode grinding. Problems such as wheel loading and glazing can be encountered while grinding with fine abrasive wheels. Electrolytic in-process dressing (ELID) is an efficient method to dress the grinding wheel while performing grinding. In this paper, a fundamental study on the mechanism of the ELID grinding technique is discussed in detail. Several sets of experiments have been performed to determine the optimal grinding conditions. From the experiments, it has been established that surface roughness could be further improved if the current duty ratio to dress the grinding wheel were increased. The force patterns and the changes in the profile of the grinding wheel during machining are also presented and discussed in detail.