How to Select Abrasives with Right Grit Size & Hardness

Abrasive is an important factor to be considered when used on abrasive products to achieve a better grinding effect. The workpiece and the materials performance, such as hardness, tensile strength, and toughness should be taken into account when choosing abrasives. Some basic principles of choosing abrasives are: harder abrasives for harder workpieces, high toughness abrasives for high tensile strength workpieces, high intensity silicon carbide abrasives for low tensile strength workpieces.

In particular, brown fused alumina is suitable for grinding carbon steel, cast iron alloy steel, and hard bronze; white fused alumina is ideal for grinding hardened steel, alloy steel, high-speed steel, chisel tool steel, etc.; black silicon carbide is designed for grinding non-ferrous metal, rubber, leather, plastics, etc. Green silicon carbide is usually used to grind hard alloy, optical glass, ceramic materials, etc. SG and CBN ceramic abrasive products have been widely used in difficult-to-grind materials.

Besides that, to give the advantages of all kinds of abrasives in grinding to the full play, currently, abrasive products manufacture has adopted mixed abrasives to improve grinding efficiency. For example, A/WA mixed abrasives are adopted in spheroidal graphite cast iron grinding. Mixed brown fused alumina and white fused alumina have both high intensity and good thermal conductivity.