A novel technique for dressing metal-bonded diamond grinding wheel with abrasive waterjet and touch truing

The dressing of metal-bonded diamond grinding wheels is difficult despite their availabilities on hard and brittle materials. In this paper, a novel compound technology that combines abrasive waterjet (AWJ) and touch truing is proposed for dressing metal-bonded diamond grinding wheel precisely and efficiently. The dressing experiments of a coarse-grained and a fine-grained bronze-bonded diamond grinding wheel were carried out on a surface grinder with a developed AWJ system. The feasibility of this method was verified by analyzing the wheel runout, the truing forces, and the wheel surface topography. The variations of 3D surface roughness of wheel surface topography during the compound dressing process were quantitatively analyzed. The mechanism of AWJ and touch compound dressing is also discussed. Further, a reaction-bonded silicon carbide block was ground to validate the dressing quality. The experiment results indicate that the grinding wheels that were well dressed by the proposed technique leads to a smaller grinding force and a smaller surface roughness than that of undressed wheels.