Practical application of new simulation methods for the elimination of geometric instabilities in centerless grinding

Elimination of geometric lobing in centerless grinding has been extensively investigated. Several models have been successfully developed, but no practical tool has been implemented on machines to ease the setting up of the machine to ensure stable conditions. This paper describes a software tool which has been developed for setting up and optimization of centerless plunge grinding processes to avoid geometric instabilities. The software generates stability maps showing the stable and non-stable geometric configurations and the number of lobes generated in non-stable conditions. Complementary time domain models quantitatively predict the evolution of the profile error for each geometric configuration.