Experimental and numerical study on surface generated mechanism of robotic belt grinding process considering the dynamic deformation of elastic contact wheel

In the robotic belt grinding process, the elastic contact condition between the flexible tool and the workpiece is a critical issue which extremely influences the surface quality of the manufactured part. The existing analysis of elastic removal mechanism is based on the statistic contact condition but ignoring the dynamic removal phenomenon. In this paper, we discussed the dynamic contact pressure distribution caused by the non-unique removal depth in the grinding process. Based on the analysis of the removal depth of a single grit, we obtained the topology of a single groove. With the coupling analysis of the topology single groove and grit trajectories in elastic removing procedure, an elastic grinding surface topography model was established with the consideration of the dynamic contact condition in the removing process. Robotic belt grinding experiments were accomplished to validate the precision of this model, while the result showed that the surface roughness prediction error could be confined to 11.6%, which meant this model provided higher accuracy than the traditional predicting methods.