Abstract
The porous cast-iron bonded (PCIB) diamond grinding wheel, which has recently been developed, had an excellent grinding performance for structural ceramics. Although this grinding performance of PCIB wheel depends on the porosity, the effect of the porosity on the grinding performance has not yet been studied.
In this paper, the PCIB diamond grinding wheels, which have several porosities under a constant grain volume percentage, were produced by the pulse electric current sintering method. And the grinding tests using these PCIB wheels built as a trial were undergone for silicon nitride. From experimental results, the influence of the porosity on the grinding performance was discussed. The results were as follows: (1) The wear rate of wheel increased with decreasing mechanical strength due to porosity. (2) The PCIB wheels with porosity over 25% were a low specific grinding energy with no relation to the grinding pressure.
(3) There was the optimum porosity that gave the maximum grinding ratio.
