Improving the Efficiency of Grinding Process Using the Rubber-Pasted Grinding Wheel

This paper studies the efficiency improvement of AISI 4140 steel external cylindrical grinding process. Experiments were carried out with two types of grinding wheels, a conventional and the rubber-pasted grinding wheels. With each type of the wheel, nine experiments were performed. Cooling fluid, spindle speed, feed rate and depth of cut are variables in the experiments. Two outcomes used to evaluate grinding efficiency are surface roughness and material removal rate (MRR). Experimental results demonstrate that the surface roughness achieved in the grinding operation using the rubber-pasted grinding wheels is smaller than using the conventional wheel. The Data Envelopment Analysis-based Ranking (DEAR) method was applied to determine the optimal values of the input parameters for the “minimum” surface roughness and “maximum” MRR in the cases of using each grinding wheel. It is found that the optimization of the input parameters in this circumstance are equal. Several grinding experiments for examining the values of the variables were also performed for both the wheels. The results also confirm that the surface roughness in the grinding process with the rubber wheels is about 19.42% smaller than the conventional wheels.