Evaluation of Grinding Repair through modeFrontier RSM and Ansys Mechanical

Riccardo Cenni
SACMI Imola

SACMI is an international group manufacturing machines and complete plants for the Ceramics, Beverage & Packaging, Processing and Plastics industries. This group consists about 70 companies all around the world. The case study under investigation is about the evaluation of the Effect of Grinding Repairing Operation through an user friendly tool based on modeFRONTIER Response Surface Model (RSM) capabilities. The grinding operation is one of the methods used by SACMI to repair the surface of its cast iron structural components when affected by unacceptable defects like porosities or inclusions. The grinding repair alters the component geometry, the stress field and the fatigue parameters of the studied component. The usual way to evaluate the effect of the grinding operation in terms of grinded component fatigue life is a new simulation followed by a fatigue analysis where the model geometry has to be modified according to the grinding operation. The aim of the present study is the creation of a user friendly and fast analytical Excel Worksheet to replace the modeling, simulation and fatigue analysis of the grinded component thanks to modeFRONTIER and its Response Surface Model capabilities. Two different parametric models have been built in order to consider two different geometric topologies in the same project and to fill the whole grinding tool field of application. The CAD models and the related FE models have been integrated into modeFRONTIER directly with two Workbench nodes. The fatigue analysis follows SACMI in-house procedures and rules and it’s implemented in an excel node at the end of the project flow. The final outputs are given to the users in terms of Safety Factors and come from the integration between three different RSM obtained with modeFRONTIER and some analytical calculations. This tool is currently used in SACMI to evaluate the Effect of Grinding Repairing Operation since it has been validated and it allows a large saving in terms of human-time.