Porous structure design and fabrication of metal-bonded diamond grinding wheel based on selective laser melting (SLM)

High porosity will bring about a great deal of contributions for metal-bonded grinding wheels. In this research, cellular structures, including octahedron, truncated octahedron, and stellated octahedron, are chosen as porous structures for a grinding wheel and fabricated using selective laser melting (SLM) with diamond/AlSi10Mg mixed powders. Moreover, the microstructure and bonding condition of SLM-fabricated composite are investigated. Additionally, morphological properties, mechanical properties, and permeability of three different porous structures are studied and compared with each other based on experiment and simulation. It is revealed that the microstructure of SLM-fabricated composite exhibits anisotropic due to the layered manufacturing essence. Furthermore, the cladding state of diamond grits is good and strong interface forms between diamond and AlSi10Mg. Besides, both mechanical performance and permeability of octahedron structure are the best, making it a potential structure for a high-performance porous grinding wheel.