Continuous Generating Cutting Tool Grinding 2

• Applicant: Professor Dr.-Ing. Berend Denkena
• Subject Area: Metal-Cutting and Abrasive Manufacturing Engineering
• Term: from 2017 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 355458859

Continuous generating gear grinding, profile grinding and gear honing rank among the most established operations for the hard machining of cylindrical gear toothings. The key feature of those gear wheels is the periodical arrangement of the teeth on the circumference with either parallel or inclined flanks regarding the rotation axis of the gear. This allows the hard machining of the gears using worm- and gear shaped grinding wheels in a process that follows the kinematics of a transmission. The regular arrangement of teeth can also be found in cutting tools, e.g. end mills, drills, reamers or side milling cutters. Those tools are usually produced using ordinary profiled grinding wheels such as cylindrical grinding wheels, profile grinding wheels and cup wheels with linear contours. The first part of this project has shown that the production of cutting tools using a continuous generating grinding process is possible. Especially the simultaneous machining of multiple cutting teeth and the utilization of grinding wheel shift strategies demonstrate the potential of this innovative tool grinding process. The simultaneous production of the rake and flank faces allows the reduction of necessary production steps and thus can reduce the manufacturing time. The utilization of shifting strategies, known from gear grinding, promise a higher accuracy of the workpiece geometry through a reduction of tool wear and offers the possibility to further increase the productivity of the cutting tool manufacturing process. However, the utilization of CBN-grinding wheels has to be investigated in order to maximize the performance of the newly developed process. Therefore, the main goal of this project is to investigate the process behavior of CBN tools during the continuous generating grinding of cutting tools.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants