Ultrasonically assisted grinding for mirror surface finishing of dies with electroplated diamond tools

This paper describes ultrasonically assisted grinding used to obtain a glossy surface quickly and precisely. High-quality surfaces are required for plastic injection molding dies used in the production of plastic parts such as dials for cellular phones. Traditionally, in order to finish the dies, manual polishing by a skilled worker has been required after the machining processes, such as electro discharge machining (EDM), which leaves an affected layer and milling, which leaves tooling marks. However manual polishing causes detrimental geometrical deviations of the die and consumes several days to finish a die surface. Therefore, a machining process for finishing dies without manual polishing to improve the surface roughness and form accuracy would be extremely valuable. In this study, a 3D positioning machine equipped with an ultrasonic spindle was used to conduct grinding experiments. An electroplated diamond tool was used for these experiments. Generally, diamond tools cannot grind steel because of excessive wear as a result of carbon atoms diffusing into bulk steel and chips. However ultrasonically assisted grinding can achieve a fine surface (roughness Rz of 0.4 mu m) on die steel without severe tool wear. The final aim of this study is to realize mirror surface grinding for injection molding dies without manual polishing. To do this, it is necessary to fabricate an electroplated diamond tool with high form accuracy and low run-out. This paper describes a tool-making method for high precision grinding and the grinding performance of a self-electroplated tool. The ground surface textures, tool performance and tool life were investigated A ground surface roughness Rz of 0.14 um was achieved Our results show that the spindle speed, feed rate and cross feed affected the surface texture. One tool could finish 5000mm(2) of die steel surface without any deterioration of the ground surface roughness.