Abstract
A sandwich tool for fabricating many numbers of minute grooves at one ultrasonic-machining process has been devised. The width of the groove can be decreased if the thickness of a tool tip for ultrasonic machining decreases.This situation, however, causes the problem of decreasing of the stiffness of the tool for ultrasonic machining. If a tool is made of a soft material, the surface damage of the workpiece by ultrasonic impacts of the abrasives slurry is little because the soft material absorbs the energy of the ultrasonic vibration. Then the sandwich tool is made by laminating thin-hard materials and thin-soft materials alternately. Thin-soft materials are necessary to control the stiffness of the whole of the sandwich tool. The width of the groove depends on the thickness of the thin-hard material and the distance between grooves depends on the thickness of the thin-soft material. In this report, the mechanism of the micro-grooving with the sandwich tool is explained, and some results of the investigation concerning the influence of the ultrasonic machining condition upon the characteristics of the grooves are shown.
