LAUSR

The use of plastics in the industry is steadily growing. Based on the material characteristics, such as low weight, conventional materials like steel are being replaced. For that reason, plastic components need to be machined to fulfill requirements regarding size shape and surface quality. Grinding processes are used to achieve high surface quality and dimensional and shape accuracy. The following article deals with scratch tests to basically analyse the grain engagement when grinding thermoplastics. For this, corundum grains are used in two different scratch test setups for fundamental analysis of the material removal process. The scratching process is evaluated by the relative chip volumes of the scratch grooves. In addition to that, the forces occuring during the process and the required specific scratch energy are analysed.