Investigation into Fluid Velocity Field of Wedge-Shaped Gap in Grinding

In the grinding process, grinding fluid is delivered for the purposes of chip flushing, cooling, lubrication and chemical protection of work surface. Hence, the conventional method of flood delivering coolant fluid by a nozzle in order to achieve high process performance purposivelly. However, hydrodynamic fluid pressure can be generated ahead of the grinding zone due to the wedge effect between wheel peripheral surface and part surface. In this paper, a theoretical fluid velocity field modeling is presented for flow of coolant fluid of wedge-shaped gap in flood delivery surface grinding, which is based on navier-stokes equation and continuous formulae. The numerical simulation results showed that the velocity in the x direction was dominant and the side-leakage in the y direction existed. The velocity in the z direction was smaller than the others because of the assumption of laminar flow. The smaller the gap is, the larger the velocity in the x direction. The magnitude of the velocity is also proportional to the surface velocity of the wheel.