A material removal model for nonconstant-contact flexible grinding

Contact calculation is of great importance in predicting the material removal (MR) of flexible grinding process (FGP). The contact is mostly considered approximately constant in the existing MR models, while the situations that contact varies a lot after FGP are ignored. Therefore, a novel model is proposed in this paper to take those situations into consideration. Firstly, the nonconstant-contact situation is introduced. Then, an equivalent method is developed to convert the nonconstant-contact grinding process into the accumulation of several quasi-constant-contact grinding processes. Based on the equivalent method, a MR model is established, and the procedure to obtain the model parameters by the finite element analysis (FEA) is introduced. In the end, the equivalent method and the MR model are tested by a series experiments of different process parameters. Results show that the proposed MR model can predict the material removal effectively for the nonconstant-contact situations.