A Comparison of Techniques to Measure the Wear Flat Area of Conventional and Superabrasive Grinding Wheels

Wear of abrasive grains is one of the key issues influencing the grinding process and the resulting workpiece quality. Being able to quantify wheel wear in-process allows parameterization of grinding models that can help assuring part surface integrity. However, one of the main problems in measuring wear of abrasive grains is their small size, which makes this task to be not trivial. In this paper, several measuring techniques are compared in order to determine which one offers the best potential to quantify the wear of conventional and superabrasive grinding wheels. The selected techniques include optical macroscopy, optical microscopy, profilometry, and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). Among other results, direct comparisons of the same exact wear flat area measured with different techniques are shown.