Investigation on abrasive wear of electroplated diamond belt in grinding nickel-based superalloys

Diamond abrasive belt has been widely used for ultra-precision grinding and polishing of hard-brittle materials due to its excellent rigid-flex compound characteristics. Nevertheless, severe wear affects its machining performance for plastic difficult-to-machine materials. Therefore, a series of experimental research are carried out to investigate the abrasive wear of electroplated diamond belt in grinding nickel-based superalloys in this paper. The height variation of diamond grits measured by a super depth-of-field microscope is defined as the evaluation indicator of wear degree. Orthogonal experiments are conducted to obtain the dominant influential process parameters of abrasive belt wear height. The single-factor experiments of the main influential parameters grinding speed and normal force are performed to furtherly explore the relationship between abrasive belt wear and process parameters as well as state parameters. The results show that increased grinding speed and normal force contribute to higher grinding temperature and more severe belt wear. Consistently, the change tendency of the material removal and surface roughness corresponds to the wear degree. Additionally, electron microscope detection, Raman scattering, and energy dispersive spectroscopy were used to explore wear mechanism more deeply. The results reveal that various granularity mainly affect the physical wear modes subdivided into abrasion, fracture, and pull-off. What’s more, graphitization transition of the diamond grit peaks and oxidative wear indicate that chemical wear is also one of the main forms of abrasive grit wear.