Basic investigations for increasing the performance of stone machining with tangentially vibrating, ultrasonically excited tools

• Applicant: Dr.-Ing. Thomas Stehle
• Subject Area: Metal-Cutting and Abrasive Manufacturing Engineering
• Term: from 2016 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 320797681

A literature research has been carried out, demonstrating that further research is needed into hybrid vibration-assisted stone machining. Particularly with regard to the realised vibration excitation or rather the vibration direction, it can be noticed that a large number of publications deals with axial excitation. However, hybrid systems with tangential excitation have hardly been examined yet. In addition, the few publications in this field deal only marginally with the technology of ultrasonically assisted cutting. They also concentrate exclusively on the theoretical possibilities for tangential vibration generation, but not on the possibilities for the application and the understanding of the fundamental mechanisms necessary for a successful application. Many questions have been completely left out of consideration until now, including questions about process or material-specific parameters, about suitable machining strategies taking account of the material to be machined and about possible measures to improve the machining quality.Hence there is a need for action regarding the research into vibration-assisted machining with a tangential excitation component. Thus the aim of this research project is to better understand the mechanisms of vibration-assisted cutting with tangential excitation as well as the derived machining strategies and parameters for a successful application in hybrid cutting processes. For this purpose, several concepts of tangentially vibrating sonotrodes will be developed and examined in this project. The subsequent cutting tests are intended for discovering the predominant correlations in vibration-assisted stone machining and increasing the process understanding. In addition, the findings gained will be used for working out production guidelines and identifying an optimum process parameter window on ultrasonically assisted stone machining.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigator: Professor Dr.-Ing. Mathias Liewald