Automating the mold-material grinding process

Grinding is difficult to control because abrasive grains are scattered randomly on the surface of the grinding wheel, and the quality of the grinding work is strongly dependent on the skill of the operator. Therefore, automation and optimization technologies should be established immediately for grinding, along with other machining work. From this perspective, we observed the bending vibrations of a diamond wheel during a grinding project and developed a technique to identify the grinding condition by using a microphone to measure the small noises from the vibration (called bending-vibration noise in this paper). In this paper, we report the application of the technique to an ordinary grinding wheel, and our attempt to automate the grinding work of STAVAX and SKD11 metal materials.