Investigation on secondary self-sharpness performance of hollow-sphere abrasive grains in belt grinding of titanium alloy

Abrasive belt grinding has been gradually applied in the precision machining of those thinner titanium-alloy components with complex surface. However, the unsatisfactory wear resistance of traditional accumulated abrasive belt becomes an obstacle to further application of this grinding technique. Therefore, the belt with a new-type structure abrasive grains is proposed, and the secondary self-sharpness performance of this hollow-sphere abrasive grain is mainly investigated in this work. Fractal dimension was employed to represent the self-sharpness of the hollow-sphere abrasive grains, and the material removal ability and efficiency was defined to represent the self-sharpness performance. It was observed that there were four damage modes of the hollow-sphere abrasive grains in the progressive wear process, and the experimental results revealed that the self-sharpness performance was optimum in condition of the damage mode c compared with others. The self-sharpness performance is improved with the augment in grinding pressure and grinding speed, but the promotion of grinding speed on which was more effective than grinding pressure. Besides, the results of contrastive experiment indicated the self-sharpness performance of hollow-sphere abrasive belt is preferable to that of traditional abrasive belt, and the maximum gap of self-sharpness performance is nearly 1.78 times. The above findings are expected to provide a fundamental research work for the further engineering application of this new-type hollow-sphere abrasive belt.