Study of Convective Heat Transfer in Grinding Applied to Tool Carbide

Abstract

The grinding temperature is of great importance for the quality and integrity of machined cemented carbide tool. Tool edge surfaces may be damaged by softening or being stressed, hardened, burned, or cracked. Former research on grinding temperature prediction often made assumptions to simplify heat convection due to the grinding fluid. However, these simplifying assumptions can sometimes undermine the mathematical relationships between grinding conditions and surface temperature, particularly in low-temperature grinding where fluid convection is most important. This paper is an attempt to provide an improved comprehensive thermal model for the prediction of contact temperatures and for monitoring and control of thermal damage. Based on previous thermal model research, this paper tackles a key element of the thermal model for temperature prediction. It proposes a convective heat transfer model based on the classic theory of turbulent flow passing a plate. Theoretical predictions from the thermal model of turbulent flow developed in this paper are compared with experimental values. Predictions are further compared with values from a previously published laminar flow model. And it is shown that the new model leads to a significant reduction in predicted temperatures. The results suggest that the thermal model for the turbulent flow provides a reasonable estimate of predicted temperature values within the region of the fluid boiling temperature. The estimates appear to be an improvement compared with the laminar flow thermal model. The turbulent flow thermal model is considered to improve estimates of background contact temperatures in grinding cemented carbide.