Influence of grinding parameters on the quality of high content PCBN cutting inserts

Plunge-face grinding is commonly used to finish PCBN cutting inserts. In order to reach an adequateprocess design, an investigation of the influence of the grinding parameters on the quality of high contentPCBN inserts is carried out in this work. For this, the inserts are ground with different grinding wheels(including a variation of grain size and bonding), dressing feed rates, feed and cutting speeds and theedge chipping and flank face roughness are measured. It was found that a reduction of the abrasive grainsize as well as an increase of the dressing feed rate lead to an improvement of the insert edge and surfacequality. Moreover, a variation of the cutting and feed speeds has only a small influence on the PCBN insertquality.