Intelligent Optimization and Control of Grinding Processes - The NIST ATP Project

A partnership with TechSolve, Delphi, Purdue University, Landis Gardner, and AGT
Grinding processes are a costly final machining process in the production of components requiring smooth surfaces and fine tolerances. Because of the complexity of the process and the numerous factors affecting it, optimization of grinding processes is a difficult task. Most production grinding processes are not optimized and because of the inefficient output, over $10 billion a year is lost in the US productivity.

The research being conducted at TechSolve seeks to develop a systematic method to design, optimize and intelligently control various grinding processes for the automotive, aerospace, medical, MEMS, electronics and other high precision machining industries. This new "intelligent" optimization and control technique will be based on new emerging methods in soft-computing and artificial intelligence. The developed method will provide means of incorporating analytical models, empirical relationships and heuristic rules in a unified fashion and will search for an optimal solution using an innovative inferencing mechanism. In addition, a new method will be developed for automatic induction of fuzzy rules from mathematical models and empirical data. Furthermore, integrated sensing and process condition monitoring capabilities will be developed with embedded sensors, leading to sensor fusion.

There are broad economic benefits expected from this research.
  -   Provide U.S. Grinding Machines and Services industries with a global competitive advantage
      ($500M/year, U.S. market)
  -   Increased market share for U.S. Grinding Industry
  -   Impact U.S. manufacturers using grinding for precision mechanical components in: aerospace,
      automotive, medical, appliance, heavy equipment, defense vehicles, power tools ($25B/year, U.S.
      market)
  -   Potential economic benefit to U.S. component producing industries: 10% improved productivity on
      $25 billion = $2.5 billion impact

For additional information regarding the optimization of grinding processes, please contact Dr. Anil Srivastava at (513) 948-2004.