High-speed grinding

In rectification, three main types of process can be defined:

• shallow-cut grinding, known as conventional or alternative grinding;

• slow feed deep pass machining, also known as RPPAL slow feed deep pass grinding;

• RTGV very high-speed grinding.

These techniques are shown in figure 1 .

Although the main advantages of very high-speed processes have already been set out by a number of authors (Tawakoli [3][8][9] , Malle [4] , Gühring [5] , Greiswald and Gärtner [6] , Schafto [7] , Werner [8] , König [10] and Torbaty [13] ), industry today is still reluctant to apply them. Lack of know-how, mistrust of a new technique, high investment costs and problems in applying it to a specific operation are all factors preventing its implementation.

The aim of this article is to present the development of these processes in research and industry, describing the technical bases and the behavior of the main parameters during machining, and giving examples of industrial applications with the different components used on the market.

But first, it's worth tracing the development of these very high-speed techniques (table 1 ).

For conventional...