High Speed Grinding of Nickel-Based Superalloy with Single Diamond Grit

Nickel-based superalloy plays an extremely important role in gas turbine engines in aerospace industry. To understand the high and super high speed grinding mechanism of nickel-based superalloy, the single-grit grinding mechanism is needed to be investigated. Previous studies on single grit were all carried out by mean of cutting or scratching. In this work, a novel experimental set-up of single-grit grinding had been developed to meet the reality of the complex kinematic grinding process. Grooves and collected chips were investigated in grinding of a typical nickel-based alloy GH4169 with wheel speed up to 150 m/s. The groove integrity is improved by increasing the grinding speed even though the chip thickness is kept constant. The typical serrated chips were observed and the frequency of chip segmentation increases linearly with the increasing of the grinding speed. Under high and super high grinding, the thermal softening due to the high temperature in adiabatic shear zone contributes to accelerate the chip formation and leads to decrease the grinding force.