Ph.D. Dissertation Defense by Kristian W. Krueger
Tuesday, November 22, 2005

(Dr.Thomas Kurfess, Chair)

"Bore Waviness Measurement Using an In-Process Gage"

Abstract

Profile waviness is one of the main causes for scrapped parts in precision bore grinding. Although efforts have been made to reduce its occurrence, the problem has not been eliminated completely. In production, the identification of a few scrapped parts in a lot of several thousands often requires expensive manual processes. Grinding machines used to produce these parts are usually equipped with measurement gage heads having tactile probes. Until now, these in-process gages have been used to measure only the average diameter of the part.

This research focused on the use of these tactile probes to measure bore waviness in precision-ground parts. The first objective was to develop a post-process machine that performs automated measurement of the bore profile and is capable of detecting waviness. The machine was built using the same measurement system and the same roll-shoe centerless fixture as the grinding machines used for the production of the parts. The machine was designed and set up such that disturbances of the measurement are minimized. It was shown that the machine reaches accuracies close to those obtained by manually operated roundness machines. The cycle time is approximately 4 seconds per part compared to several minutes for manually operated roundness machines.

As a second objective, the possibility of measuring waviness directly in the grinding machine was evaluated. Feasible design modifications to reduce the effect of disturbances are very limited in grinding machines, since interference with the grinding process must be avoided. Therefore, analytical methods were developed to reduce these effects and partly restore the original profile. The main disturbances that were addressed are errors due to irregular sampling of the profile, to the frequency response behavior of the gage heads, and to motion of the workpiece center relative to the gage heads. The post-process machine was used as a development and test platform for the analytical methods. To further verify these methods, tests were also conducted in an industrial grinding machine.