Grinding Characteristics of Reaction Bonded Silicon Carbide

Surface topography, surface residual stress and bending strength of RBSiC ground using diamond wheel were studied. Grinding RBSiC is removed mainly by brittle fracture and lightly by ductile cutting. With the increase of down feed, surface roughness Ra increases. Burnishing with no down feed can improve the Ra in some way. With increasing down feed, the compressive residual stress decreases because of an inadequately cooling effect. Compare with the specimens grounded using 0.9 μm/s, those using down feed of 1.35 μm/s have worse surface quality. Considering both the processing efficiency and the surface quality, the optimum parameters are as follow: 0.9μm/s down feed, 2.1 r/min work table rotational speed and 1 min burnishing.