Research on a novel fabricating method of diamond grinding tool with defined grain arrangement

Grain-arranged grinding tool refers to a kind of grinding tool in which the position of abrasive grains on grinding tool can be controlled artificially. In this paper, a new method for fabrication of grain-arranged grinding tool is proposed, which is to directly coat the mask material (UV ink) on the metal substrate, and then by combining laser ablation and grain electroplating technology, the grinding tool with orderly arrangement of abrasive grains can finally be obtained. For the proposed fabrication method, the fabrication process is introduced in detail, mainly including the relationship between laser ablation parameters and the ablated mask hole depth, and the relationship between mask hole aspect ratio and the morphology of the plated layer in the mask hole. It is found that for laser ablation of UV ink, the critical laser power to remove the UV ink is 1.79 W, and the critical ablation threshold is 0.269 J/cm 2 . When the used laser power is 5.4–21 W, the relationship between laser power and the ablated hole depth is basically linear. For mask hole electroplating process, it is found that the unevenness of the plated layer in the mask hole and the growth rate of the plating layer increase with the decrease of the mask hole aspect ratio. By using the proposed method, grain-arranged grinding tool with 6 mm diameter, 95 μm grain size, and 150 μm grain spacing has been successfully fabricated, and its processing performance has been preliminarily validated by machining experiments.