Abstract
Prediction of contact between a grinding wheel and a workpiece is being required from production engineers. A prediction system of grinding-wheel contact was, therefore, developed employing the defused-laser detection from the trailing flow of grinding fluid. In this paper, the prediction system has been applied to grinding-wheel positioning. Trigger signal from the prediction system for stopping the wheel feed is sent to NC system when the diffused-laser intensity exceeds a certain level. Unevenness of the detected laser intensity results in the positioning error, which increases with the wheel-approach speed. Therefore, the trigger level is increased discretely with decrease of the wheel-approach speed. The wheel-positioning accuracy of the proposed system is 10 to 20μm.
