Investigation of Grinding Force and Surface Integrity of IC10 in Creep Feed Grinding

The IC10 superalloy material is one of the most important materials for aero-engine turbine blade due to its excellent performances such as high fatigue strength, high corrosion resistance and temperature resistance. However, it is difficult to be machined because of its special properties such as terrible tool wear and low machined efficiency. For all this, the creep feed grinding is widely used in machining IC10 superalloy due to the advance in reducing tool wear, improving material removal rate and surface quality. In the creep feed grinding, the grinding depth is as large as 10mm or more, which would produce large grinding force and have a significant influence on the workpiece surface quality. Hence, it is of great importance to study the grinding force and surface integrity in creep feed grinding IC10 superalloy.

In this paper, a series of orthogonal experiments have been carried out and the effects of grinding parameters on the grinding force and the surface roughness are analyzed. After grinding, the topographies and defects of the machined surface were observed and analyzed using SEM. The results of the experiments show that the tangential force is decreased with the workpiece speed increasing. However, there is no significant change in tangential force with the increasing of grinding depth and wheel speed. The normal force is decreased with the workpiece speed increasing when the workpiece speed is less than 150mm/min, but when the workpiece speed is more than 150mm/min the normal force is increased tardily. Moreover, the normal force is increased sharply with the increase of grinding depth and is increased slowly with the increase of wheel speed. When workpiece speed is changed from 100mm/min to 150mm/min there are obvious differences of peaks and valleys on the ground surface, and at the mean time the values of the surface roughness are changed too, in general, the surface roughness is increased with workpiece speed and grinding depth increasing, while the trend of increase corresponding that of workpiece speed is more evident. The value of the surface roughness is decreased with wheel speed increasing. In order to find out the defects on the grinding surface in creep feed grinding, a scanning electron microscope is used to observe the topography of the ground surface of the workpiece, it is found out that the main defect is burning of the IC10 superalloy material in creep feed grinding by energy spectrum analysis of some typical topography in this study.