The application of high performance materials can lead to enhanced product properties. The associated challenging material properties set higher demands on the manufacturing processes. However, the ever-present demand for cost reduction of the manufacturing processes conflicts with the continuously increasing demands on product quality.
In principle, higher surface quality results in higher energy consumption. Higher geometrical demands in combination with difficult to cut materials lead to increasingly complex machine tool and subsystem solutions, which also contribute to the higher energy consumption. However, the full potential of a process is often not utilized in order to ensure that damages to the workpiece at the end of cost intensive and long value chains are avoided. This leads to the situation that complex machine tools equipped with high performance tools operate under significantly reduced productivity. This means that the production process itself must be reliable in particular during high performance machining.
In this paper, various grinding strategies were regarded in terms of possible increase in productivity and process stability. Furthermore a nonconventional option of flexible machining is presented. It will be shown that the process of speed stroke grinding of ceramic materials can be used as a highly productive alternative to reciprocating grinding and external cylindrical grinding with grooved cBN-grinding-wheels for example in the grinding of rolling bearing rings. The machining of high performance materials with simple machine concepts, such as robots, is presented with regards to more flexibility and at the same time machine accuracies comparable to these machine tools.
