Stability Analysis of Centerless Grinding with Loss of Contact Nonlinearity

The paper presents a novel geometrical stability analysis of centerless grinding that takes into account the nonlinearity associated to wheel-workpiece detachment during lobes formation. Even though the rounding mechanism in centerless grinding has been studied since more than fifty years, stability analysis has been carried out applying stability criteria for linear systems (e.g., Nyquist) on a process model that neglects actual removal "clipping" due to wheel-workpiece detachment. This model limitation is usually overcome by considering only an integer number of lobes, supporting the restriction by the claim that a non-integral number of waves is less likely to build up since the waviness must be constantly removed and replaced by a succeeding wave, which is constantly moving around the workpiece. In this work, the nonlinearity entailed by removal clipping is explicitly taken into account and, by harmonic linearization, represented by a double input describing function (DIDF). Applying the Nyquist criterion on the resulting equivalent delayed system, the paramount instability associated to a quasi-integer number of lobes emerges naturally, without requiring additional assumptions. Moreover, it is shown that the nonlinearity due to wheel-workpiece detachment does not produce a limit cycle in a reasonable operation time. The results delivered by the proposed approach are verified by numeric simulations and positively compared to the relevant literature. The proposed formulation can be easily extended to consider also machine structure dynamics, thus increasing, even in this case, the accuracy of the stability analysis provided by the standard approach.