Abrasive Grain Efficiency and Surface Roughness in Machining Magnesium Alloys by Newly Developed Cup-type Diamond-Grinding-Wheels

New cup-type diamond-grinding-wheels with hexagonal pattern have been developed. Grinding stone ratio, R is defined as the ratio between the hexagonal edge area containing abrasive grains and the total area of the wheel surface. In the present work, four kinds of hexagonal grinding wheels with different R (13 %, 19 %, 25 % and 36 %) and a conventional wheel (R: 100 %) were used to grind a light metals, which was represented by magnesium alloy AZ31B. Efficiency of abrasive grains and ground surface for machining a light metals were evaluated by calculating the number of abrasive grains which pass through a unit length of a sample surface for each grinding pass, N-g. The results show that surface roughness becomes smaller, i.e., smoother surfaces as N-g increases. Surfaces ground by the conventional wheel are rougher than those by using newly developed hexagonal grinding-wheels in spite of the larger N-g for the conventional wheel. Surface roughness data forms one curve in roughness vs. N-g graph for all hexagonal wheels, and forms another curve for the conventional grinding-wheel. The difference of two curves indicates that the number of effective working abrasive grains in hexagonal wheels is about 5 times higher than that of the conventional wheel. The similar results were obtained for machining sapphire according to our previous work. Hexagonal wheels show higher abrasive grain efficiency for machining not only hard-to-machine ceramics but also light metals such as magnesium alloys than conventional wheels.