Investigation of internal ultrasonically assisted grinding of small holes: effect of ultrasonic vibration in truing and dressing of small CBN grinding wheel

In internal grinding of small holes, it is hard to realize high accuracy truing and dressing for the grinding wheel when a conventional truing/dressing method using single diamond dresser or rotary cup wheel is employed. Because of the cantilever support condition of the spindle shaft the stiffness of shaft is reduced. Thus the truing force leads the shaft to a significant deformation during truing/dressing. In this study, for improving the truing and dressing accuracy, a new truing/dressing method was proposed, in which the grinding wheel is ultrasonically vibrated along its axis during truing/dressing with a GC rotary cup wheel. A series of experiments were carried out to investigate the effects of the wheel ultrasonication on the truing force reduction, the truing accuracy improvement and the wheel surface condition. In addition, the grinding force and work surface roughness experimentally obtained by using the wheels trued with or without ultrasonication were compared. The experimental results indicated that applying ultrasonic vibration to the wheel decreases the normal and tangential grinding forces by more than 20% and 24%, respectively, and the surface roughness by as much as 18%.