Advances and Recent Patents in the Field of Grinding Temperature Measurement Methods

Recently, many patents have been developed for developing the measuring methods of grinding temperature. Some of them could measure temperature of grinding zones more accurately, which enables to control thermal damage of work piece and wear of grinding wheel effectively. Among these patents, one is for a grinding temperature measurement based on inverse heat conduction problem. It inlays a piece of thin film with low and stable melting point between two work pieces. The thin film will be melted by grinding heat generated by work piece ground. Temperature at certain depth could be calculated from the melted depth and melting point of the thin film. On this basis, grinding temperature will be calculated by solving the inverse heat conduction problem. Based on researches of grinding temperature measurement, this paper introduced research status of grinding temperature measurement and classified and summarized measuring methods. Currently, measuring methods of grinding temperature could be divided into direct contact measurement and non-contact measurement. Direct contact measurement includes the coating technique and thermocouple temperature measurement. Thermocouple temperature measurement can be further divided into open-top approach and clip-on approach (including artificial thermocouple and semi-artificial thermocouple). The non-contact measurement includes infrared thermal imaging, fiber-optical infrared temperature measurement, infrared radiation temperature measurement and two-color infrared temperature measurement. Working principles, characteristics and application ranges of these measuring methods were discussed and compared in this paper.