A novel flexible tool with rotary ultrasonic spindle for fine grinding of tungsten carbide

Tungsten carbide is a typical difficult-to-cut material by conventional machining processes. In this paper, a novel design of flexible abrasives tool combined with a rotary ultrasonic machining (RUM) spindle is conducted to reduce the labor force significantly. The newly designed flexibility of tool-tip is aimed at preventing overcutting from the CNC grinding. The grinding conditions with resulted surface morphology of the tungsten steel were investigated through Taguchi design of experiment and ANOVA analysis. The machining capability of the novel flexible tool is compared with conventional tools through specific grinding paths under proper operational conditions.