The quenching heat treatment and grinding process on the cam could ensure the requirement of residual stress, surface roughness, hardness and other machined surface quality. The cam of large marine diesel engine is designed with a large width in the axial direction to provide greater force to the valve train. However, during the traditional grinding process, the width of the grinding wheel is usually greater than that of the cam, thus forming a large contact area between the grinding wheel and the cam in the machining process. During the process, the grinding heat is difficult to be dissipated to lead to grinding burn defects [1]. The swing grinding process could realize the machining of large-width workpiece with narrow grinding wheel by increasing the reciprocating motion of the grinding wheel along its axis. This improvement could reduce the contact area between the grinding wheel and the cam and transfer the grinding heat timely which effectively solves the problems existing in traditional grinding process. However, the application of swing grinding process is limited since the influence of the process parameters, especially the increased swing amplitude and swing frequency, on the machined surface is still not clear. Therefore, it is urgent to study the influence of swing grinding process parameters on surface quality of the large-width cam.
Although there are few works of literature about swing grinding, a lot of research has been conducted on the influence of grinding parameters on surface quality processed by the traditional grinding method. The grinding residual stress plays a major role in deciding the workpiece's surface quality, including the corrosion resistance, the fatigue property, and the reliability [2]. Denkena et al. [3] investigated the influences of grinding with Toric CBN grinding tools on the residual stress and got the conclusion that a good surface finish could be achieved with small cutting grain size, low feed rates and frontal grinding strategy. Shen et al. [4] studied the surface and subsurface residual stress distributions in ground C-250 maraging steel (3J33) after the grinding process and the results showed that the surface residual stress and peak compressive residual stress depend greatly on the grinding speed and the residual stress penetration depth increases with the increase of the grinding speed and grinding depth and decreases with the increase of the workpiece speed while the depth of peak compressive residual stress varies slightly with the grinding parameters. Zhao et al. [5] researched the effects of contact surface friction, grain's tip radius, grain's protrusion depth, and grain's rake angle on residual stress distribution after abrasive belt rail grinding (ABRG) based on ABRG test beach and 3D finite element model (FEM). Xiao et al. [6] concluded that the residual stresses in both profile and axis directions increase linearly as the feed rate and the cutting depth increase in the grinding process of gear tooth flank through the experimental and simulated methods. Hamdi et al. [7] investigated the influence of grinding parameters on the residual stress of steel by simulating the stable grinding stage and the cooling stage after grinding and they found that the residual stress was positively related to the grinding linear speed. More works about the grinding-induced residual stresses in metallic materials can be seen in the review literature [8].
As an important variable of the grinding quality, the surface roughness is a variable often used to describe the performance of the finished part as well as to evaluate the competitiveness of the overall grinding system [9]. Aiming at the roughness, an improved grinding roughness model was established for cylindrical plunge grinding through analyzing the existing roughness models where the infeed rate of the grinding table was selected as the weighting factor and the model was also used for the optimization algorithm of the grinding procedure [10]. Xu et al. [11] developed a new method for predicting the surface roughness in spherical grinding and the process parameters that affect spherical surface roughness were theoretically analyzed and experimentally studied. Lin et al. [12] measured the surface roughness during grinding processes on BK7 glass and the experimental results showed that the values of surface roughness increased with the increment of feed rate and grinding depth, and the decrement of wheel speed. To improve the bearing capacity and reliability of face gears, Wang et al. [13] studied the grinding surface roughness based on the grinding machining principle and summarized the influence of grinding parameters on the surface roughness. Lipinski et al. [14] used an artificial neural network to model the influence of parameters and conditions of the surface grinding process on the value of roughness. Guo et al. [15] applied a sequential deep learning framework, long short-term memory (LSTM) network, to predict ground surface roughness.
Besides the residual stress and the roughness, the hardness also plays an important role to measure the surface integrity and has a significant effect on the fatigue strength and wear resistance of workpieces [16]. Sun et al. [17] presented a new hybrid model to investigate the dynamic hardness distribution with the grinding force and the model was validated by the measurement of the ground workpiece's hardness via grinding experiments under different grinding depths. Zhou et al. [18] established the one-dimensional analytic model for surface micro-hardness in terms of grinding speed, grinder work-table feed speed, grinding depth, incline angle, and deflection angle as process parameters in quick-point grinding ceramics through immune algorithms and orthogonal experiment data. Shi et al. [19] proposed an approximate hardness model of structural steel after grinding and studied the variation and influencing mechanism of hardness along with grinding parameters. Guo et al. [20] integrated the finite element (FE) and cellular automata (CA) approach to explore the distribution and variation of the grinding temperature of the workpiece surface in a grind-hardening process and predicted the hardness of the hardened layer with different grinding parameters.
It can be seen that the research on the swing grinding processing parameters on the surface quality of the cam has not been sufficient so far. In this paper, the effects of the swing grinding process parameters on the residual stress, the roughness and the hardness of the cam surface are analyzed through the swing grinding test of the large-width cam.