Continuous Generating Grinding of Cemented Carbide Cutting Tools

• Applicant: Professor Dr.-Ing. Berend Denkena
• Subject Area: Metal-Cutting and Abrasive Manufacturing Engineering
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 466770632

Gearings produced by continuous generating gear grinding provide a higher process productivity and an increased workpiece quality compared to gears that were machined by discontinuous profile grinding. Therefore, continuous generating gear grinding is the most widely used process for the hard-fine machining of gears during batch production. The Institute of Production Engineering and Machine Tools at the Leibniz University Hannover transferred this process to the manufacturing of rotationally symmetric cutting tools, e.g. drilling tools and end mills. This newly developed manufacturing process allows the simultaneous manufacture of the flutes and the circumferential flank faces of the cutting tool in a continuous process. Thus, the new generating grinding process substitutes several machining operations compared to conventional tool grinding. Furthermore, the process provides a significant potential regarding the quality of ground workpieces and the process productivity. The present project transfers the existing knowledge regarding the generating grinding of cutting tools to the manufacture of cemented carbide milling tools, which are the economically and scientifically most relevant group of cutting tools. During this transfer, the dressing and utilization of grinding worms with diamond grains is studied. Furthermore, the possibility of manufacturing unequally pitched cutting tools with the newly developed process is investigated. However, the unequal pitch leads to a varying process load of each cutting edge. Those differences are compensated by an optimized grinding worm geometry, which leads to an individually designed cutting wedge geometry of each cutting tool tooth

• DFG Programme: Research Grants