Development of a Kinematic Simulation Tool to Study Cylindrical Plunge Grinding

— This paper presents a novel cylindrical plunge grinding kinematic simulator which can be used to help predict the surface roughness of ground workpieces. To significantly reduce simulation time, an innovative linear interpolation approximation approach was used. For the conditions studied, this approach was found to reduce simulation time on subsequent wheel revolutions from 274s per wheel revolution down to only 5.37 ⨯ 10 −4 s per wheel revolution – at the expense of increasing the errors in the resulting workpiece profiles by, on average, only 1.8nm. Experiments were then carried out for three different speed ratios (4.41, 4.59 and 4.78) to validate the simulator. It was found that there was excellent agreement between the experimental and simulated arithmetic mean workpiece surface roughness for the speed ratios tested.