Potentials of gear grinding with ceramic bonded cBN

 

Starting Situation

Ceramic bonded cBN tools combine the advantages of the two established cutting material bonding systems. Due to the high-performance cBN cutting grain, similarly high cutting performance can be achieved as with electroplated cBN tools. This allows the machined volume between two dressing operations to be increased compared to sintered corundum tools. Due to the dressable bond, ceramic bonded cBN tools also exhibit similar flexibility to ceramic bonded tools with sintered corundum.

However, the advantages of ceramic bonded cBN face challenges such as the high tool costs compared to sintered corundum. Ceramic bonded cBN tools can also exhibit "grinding in" behavior. The greatest challenges lie in the process design for these new tool systems, the wear behaviour of the dressing tools and the evaluation of the economic efficiency. Especially the wear of the dressing tools due to the harder cutting grain material of the grinding wheel is a special challenge when grinding with ceramic bonded cBN.

Research Objective

The overall economic and technical objective of the research project is to evaluate the performance and economic efficiency of ceramic bonded cBN tools in interaction with dressing tool wear for case-hardened cylindrical gear grinding of tooth flank profiles. This will contribute to an increase in performance in discontinuous tooth flank profile grinding with ceramic bonded cBN tools. The increase in performance includes, on the one hand, an increase in productivity when using cost-intensive tool technology and, on the other hand, an increase in the gear quality and surface quality that can be achieved. The main scientific goal of the research project is the analysis of dressing tool wear during the conditioning of ceramic bonded cBN tools for the hard fine machining of spur gears during discontinuous tooth flank profile grinding.