Recovery of grindactivity by dry ice blasting on micro-grit diamond wheel in dry grinding of carbon

In dry grinding of hard carbon parts with micro-grit diamond wheels, carbon chips adhere to the wheel surface and the grindactivity of diamond wheel is remarkably lost in a short time. There blunt diamond wheels after wheel loading have an influence on the grinding results such as the stock removal, the surface roughness of workpiece. Generally, the grinding ability of diamond wheel in which the wheel loading occurs is recovered by the dressing. However, the dressing removes not only carbon chips but also abrasive grains under carbon chips, which have enough cutting performance. Since the dressing increases irrelevant wheel wear in this case, dressing is not desirable from the viewpoint of total life of grinding wheel and manufacturing cost. The carbon chips on wheel surface could be also removed by the organic solvent cleaning, however it is undesirable for working environments. The purpose of this research is to clean up carbon chips on wheel surface by dry ice blasting for dry grinding. In addition, the recovery of grindactivity after dry ice blasting was investigated. Dry ice hardly affects the environment and workers because dry ice sublimes to carbon dioxide. In this paper, the grindactivity of micro-grit diamond wheels clean up by dry ice blasting is investigated, analyzing surface roughness of workpiece, stock removal and tangential force in grinding tests. In addition, the grindactivity of wheels treated by other methods is investigated. As a result, the dry ice blasting can remove carbon chips accumulated on micro-grit diamond wheel enough to recover the grindactivity of wheel with normal surface roughness, stock removal and tangential force as before wheel loading.