Material Removal Modeling for Free-Form Rubber Materials

Manual grinding presents significant challenges for the task of high-precision shallow uniform grinding of curved rubber materials. The use of robots and grinding discs has the potential to substantially improve both the precision and efficiency of grinding tasks. To achieve this, a precise material removal model is essential to facilitate the optimization of robot grinding parameters and path planning. Nevertheless, most existing models primarily focus on metal materials or deep grinding depths, rendering them inapplicable to rubber materials. Therefore, this study investigates the contact mechanics during disc grinding of rubber materials and quantifies the distributions of grinding pressure and speed. Additionally, it evaluates the effects of different elastic deformation and wear stages on the grinding process, ultimately developing a material removal model for free-form rubber surfaces based on the Preston equation. The validity of the model is experimentally verified. Furthermore, the study shows that, when processing workpieces with different surface shapes, the study indicates a negative correlation between both the grinding width and the grinding pressure with the curvature radius.