Developing a novel binderless diamond grinding wheel with femtosecond laser ablation and evaluating its performance in grinding soft and brittle materials

In this study, a binderless diamond grinding wheel (BDGW) is fabricated to prevent impurities embedding during the machining of soft and brittle materials by conventional grinding wheels. The ‘binder’ features, as well as the ‘grains’, are produced on a single piece of chemical vapor deposition diamond, whilst the ‘grains’ are ablated with a femtosecond laser. The performance of the novel grinding tool in terms of grinding radio, wear types, grinding forces and specific grinding energy, ground surface roughness, surface morphology, and subsurface damage is evaluated by comparing it with a resin-bonded diamond grinding wheel (RDGW). Experimental results show that the BDGW has excellent redress life with simple form of wear-abrasion wear on the top of the cutting edges and extremely high grinding radio of 103, which is nearly eight times of that of the RDGW. The benefit of the simple form of BDGW wear is that no embedded bond debris and fall-off grains appear. These conditions are essential to ensuring high ground surface quality for grinding soft and brittle materials.