Material characterization and analysis of compliant behavior of an abrasive flap wheel

• Main Author: Elangovan Sarath Ballaji
• Other Authors: Sathyan Subbiah
• Format: Theses and Dissertations
• Language: English
• Published: 2015
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Aeronautical engineering::Materials of construction
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/64812
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Compliant tools such as abrasive coated cloth, paper, and abrasive flap wheels are commonly used in manufacturing finishing processes, especially in the aerospace and precision engineering industry. Although such tools have been in use for a long time for polishing, the mechanical behavior and material removal mechanisms of many of these tools have not been understood and documented fully, as it has been done for conventional grinding. The objective of the project is to determine material properties of the abrasive flap material that affect its bending behavior and also to design and simulate the flap 's bending behavior under static loading conditions using a finite element software. The material properties determined through the experiments were validated by the finite element models simulating real life behavior of the flap material during one such experiments. There is a huge variety of abrasive flap materials available and their material properties and mechanical behavior is largely undocumented or proprietary. The experiments were conducted on an abrasive cloth material used in one of the commercially available abrasive flap wheel models from Ban Chu Leong Technologies Pte Ltd. The general limitations of this research work are, the conclusions drawn from this research work directly pertain only to the particular type of abrasive clothing under analysis. Moreover the analysis is limited to modelling static loading behavior of a single flap and does not take in to account dynamic effects. Further research work along the same lines may lead to improved models that can be used to predict the compliant behavior of similar materials. Keywords: Compliant tools, Flap wheels, bending modulus, polishing, large deflection