Modeling of grinding wheel wear in Electrolytic In-Process Dressing (ELID) Grinding

Effective precision manufacturing technologies are required to compete on an evolving market for optical glass lens systems. Today, the state of the art grinding and polishing technologies for single point contact kinematics lack efficiency. In other words, the technological process gap between grinding in brittle fracture mode and polishing in ductile material removal mode is too large. Electrolytic in-process dressing (ELID) grinding is such a technology that can close this gap. This technology enables the usage of fine grit sized grinding wheels that make ductile material removal possible. So far this technology is only used for flat and simple spherical shaped workpiece geometries due to its unknown electrolytic and mechanical wear behavior. Within this work, a grinding wheel wear model is developed and applied to the single point contact kinematics, which enables the production of free-form and aspherical shaped workpiece geometries.