Study of environmentally conscious CBN cooling-air grinding technology

The conventional grinding method uses fluid that contains chlorine, sulfur and phosphorus which aggravates the working environment and increases costs for fluid replacement and disposal. We developed the cooling-air CBN grinding system, which performs grinding by supplying cooling air to the grinding point with a solid-lubricant-impregnated CBN wheel or a CBN wheel supplied with an extremely small amount of superfine vegetable oil. This method provides better grinding performance compared with grinding under fluid. The compressive residual stress of workpieces ground using our method are higher and deeper compared with CBN grinding under fluid, and the material strength of workpieces is higher even under high-efficiency grinding.