Abrasive, sharp, hard material used to wear away the surface of softer, less resistant materials. Included within the term are both natural and synthetic substances, ranging from the relatively soft particles used in household cleansers and jeweler’s polish to the hardest known material, the diamond. Abrasives are indispensable to the manufacture of nearly every product made today.
Abrasives are used in the form of grinding wheels, sandpapers, honing stones, polishes, cutoff wheels, tumbling and vibratory mass-finishing media, sandblasting, pulpstones, ball mills, and still other tools and products. Only through the use of abrasives is industry able to produce the highly precise components and ultrasmooth surfaces required in the manufacture of automobiles, airplanes and space vehicles, mechanical and electrical appliances, and machine tools.
This article surveys the principal materials used in abrasives, the properties of those materials, and their processing into industrial products. Most abrasive products are made of ceramics, which include some of the hardest materials known. The origins of hardness (and other properties) in ceramic materials are described in the article ceramic composition and properties.
The use of abrasives goes back to earliest man’s rubbing of one hard stone against another to shape a weapon or a tool. The Bible mentions a stone called shamir that was very probably emery, a natural abrasive still in use today. Ancient Egyptian drawings show abrasives being used to polish jewelry and vases. A statue of a Scythian slave, called “The Grinder,” in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, shows an irregularly shaped natural sharpening stone used to whet a knife.
Sand and pieces of flexible hide were early man’s sandpaper. Later, craftsmen tried to fix abrasive grains to flexible backings with crude adhesives. A 13th-century Chinese document describes the use of natural gums to fix bits of seashell to parchment. About two centuries later, the Swiss began coating crushed glass on a paper backing.
Early sand and glass abrasives lacked sharpness, and by the 19th century early abrasive products like the natural sandstone that had been formed into the “grinding wheel” no longer met the needs of developing industry. In 1873 Swen Pulson, working in the Norton and Hancock Pottery Company, Worcester, Mass., U.S., won a jug of beer by betting that he could make a grinding wheel by combining emery with potter’s clay and firing them in a kiln. Pulson succeeded on his third try; this incident signaled the end of unsatisfactory glue-and-silicate bonded products and the birth of the vitrified grinding wheel.
Just before the beginning of the 20th century, when the natural abrasives emery, corundum, and garnet were falling short of industry’s demands, the American inventor Edward G. Acheson discovered a method of making silicon carbide in electric furnaces, and scientists at the Ampere Electro-Chemical Company in Ampere, N.J., U.S., developed alumina. In 1955 the General Electric Company succeeded in manufacturing synthetic diamonds. Like other man-made abrasives, synthesized diamond proved superior in many applications to the natural product, which had been used in grinding wheels since 1930.
Once used only when precise dimensional accuracy and smooth surfaces were necessary, abrasives have become a widely applied industrial tool. Higher grinding-wheel speeds, more powerful grinding machines, and improved abrasives have steadily augmented their role.
Abrasive materials: their composition and properties
The materials used to make abrasives can be broadly classified as either natural or synthetic. Natural abrasives include diamond, corundum, and emery; they occur in natural deposits and can be mined and processed for use with little alteration. Synthetic abrasives, on the other hand, are the product of considerable processing of raw materials or chemical precursors; they include silicon carbide, synthetic diamond, and alumina (a synthetic form of corundum). Most natural abrasives have been replaced by synthetic materials because nearly all industrial applications demand consistent properties. With the exception of natural diamond, most of nature’s abrasives are too variable in their properties.
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One of the most important properties necessary in an abrasive material is hardness. Simply put, the abrasive must be harder than the material it is to grind, polish, or remove. Hardness of the various abrasive materials can be measured on a number of scales, including the Mohs hardness test, the Knoop hardness test, and the Vickers hardness test. The Mohs scale, first described in 1812, measures resistance to indentation as judged by which material will scratch another. This scale, which assigns numbers to natural minerals, has been widely accepted and is used by mineralogists. The Knoop and Vickers hardness tests employ pyramid-shaped diamond indenting devices and measure the indentation made by the diamonds in a given test material. The Vickers test was designed primarily for metals. With the Knoop test, however, the hardness of extremely brittle materials including glass and even diamonds can be measured without harming either the indenter or the test piece.
Toughness or body strength characteristics are also significant to abrasive function. Ideally, a single abrasive particle resharpens itself by the breakdown of its dull cutting or working edge, which exposes another cutting edge within the same particle. In synthetic abrasives it is possible to achieve some degree of control over this property by varying grain shape during the crushing or sizing operation, by making changes in the purity of the abrasive, by alloying abrasives, and by controlling the crystal structure within abrasive grains. Thus abrasives can be developed to meet the operating conditions found in a variety of applications.
Interaction between the abrasive and the material being ground prevents the use of one abrasive as a universal medium. For example, when silicon carbide is used on steel, or alumina on glass, some reaction takes place that has yet to be clearly defined but that results in rapid dulling and inefficient abrasive action. Attrition resistance is the name given to this third, very significant property.
The table lists prominent natural and synthetic abrasive materials. Links are provided from the table to further information on the materials and the hardness scales.
Hardness of prominent abrasive materials
|abrasive materials ||hardness |
|industrial diamond ||10 ||10,000 ||8,000 |
|corundum ||9 ||2,200 ||1,600-2,100 |
|emery ||7-9 ||1,600 ||800-1,800 |
|garnet ||7-8 ||1,100-1,300 ||1,300-1,350 |
|flint ||7 ||900-1,100 ||700-800 |
|quartz ||7 ||1,100 ||700-800 |
|pumice ||5-6 ||-- ||430-560 |
|talc ||1 ||-- ||-- |
|synthetic diamond ||10 ||10,000 ||8,000-10,000 |
|boron nitride (cubic) ||10 ||7,300-10,000 ||4,700-10,000 |
|boron carbide ||9-10 ||3,300-4,300 ||2,200-5,100 |
|silicon carbide ||9 ||2,800-3,300 ||2,000-3,700 |
|alumina ||9 ||2,200 ||2,000-2,600 |
Fabrication into useful forms
Preparation and sizing
All abrasives, with the exception of the naturally appearing fine powders such as talc, must be crushed to the particle size required for use. Sizes in use vary from 4 grit, which measures about 6 millimetres (1/4 inch) in diameter, to as fine as 900 grit, which measures about six microns (0.00024 inch) or about one-tenth the thickness of a human hair. In some cases, even finer powders are required when used for the polishing of scratch-free surfaces on high-quality optical lenses and mirrors for high-power telescopes.
For the coarser sizes the crushed grain is measured by a series of test screens as established in most countries by government standards. For sizes 240 grit and smaller, the size of the grains is usually measured by a settling rate or sedimentation test.
Crushing methods have a significant effect on the cutting action and the strength of abrasive grains. Heavy crushing pressures, for example, tend to create splintery, sharp, and weak grains. These penetrate easily and remove material at a fast rate, and their cutting edges break down easily for resharpening. This shape is required in many coated abrasive products.
When a grinding wheel or coated abrasive belt is to be used to grind away large amounts of material under heavy pressures, a more regularly shaped, strong abrasive grain stands up longer. The sharp edge is not as necessary because heavy pressures are used that effect the penetration of the abrasive into the material being ground.
The most important abrasive product manufactured is the grinding wheel. Made of abrasive grain and a binder, or “bond,” it is a self-sharpening cutting tool. As the grains on the periphery become dull, they are shed from the surface of the grinding wheel, and fresh, sharp cutting edges are exposed. The ability to resharpen is controlled by the nature of the bond used and the ratio of abrasive to bond, measured by volume.
Forming and firing
In the manufacture of grinding wheels, abrasives of the proper size and bonding materials are weighed and mixed together in a power mixing machine. When thoroughly mixed, measured amounts of the abrasive and bond mixture are evenly distributed in steel molds. The mold is placed in a powerful hydraulic press, and the mixture is compressed to the desired wheel size, allowing some oversize in dimensions for finishing operations. Pressures vary with wheel size and may be upwards of several hundred tons. Some shaving and shaping of the wheels is done before they are baked or fired.
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The majority of grinding wheels made have a vitreous, ceramic bond, made of clays and feldspars. The so-called vitrified wheel is fired in high-temperature kilns at temperatures of 1,260° C (2,300° F). Electric-, oil-, and gas-fired kilns are used. The length of the “burn” varies with wheel size and can be as long as two weeks.
The remaining 35–40 percent of the grinding wheels manufactured have organic-type bonds using resins, rubber, or shellac as the bonding material. These wheels are baked at temperatures of between 150° and 200° C (300° and 400° F). The lower temperature permits the inclusion of steel rings, molded-in threaded bushings, or fibreglass reinforcements, which become baked into the wheel and serve to make it more resistant to breakage from side pressure. The bushings help to hold the wheel in place on certain grinding machines.
Organic wheels can be made much thinner than vitrified wheels, and they are used in place of metal saw blades for cutting a great variety of materials.
Truing, grading, and testing
Nearly all grinding wheels must be finished after they have been baked or fired. In a process called truing, the wheels are cut to final size, and the outside glazed layers resulting from the kiln are removed, making the sides of the wheel parallel and the size of the arbor hole accurate; at the same time the working surface of the wheel is sharpened. Wheels are trued by using conical steel cutters, by rubbing in beds of steel shot, and by grinding with grinding wheels.
Grading of wheels assures that they have the correct resistance to wear. Grade or hardness, determined by the amount of bond, permits the grinding wheel to keep itself sharp and free-cutting in a variety of conditions. Grinding wheels used for heavy grinding operations are “harder” and are made with greater amounts of bond, retaining the abrasive particles longer under severe conditions such as those found in steel mills and foundries. In the tool room where industrial cutting tools are sharpened, softer wheels, with less bond per unit of abrasive, are required, so that, as soon as the abrasive grains start to dull and the possibility develops of building up heat in the sensitive cutting tool being ground, the wheel will resharpen and shed the dulled grains.
Finally, grinding wheels are checked for balance to assure that they will run without vibration. Grinding wheels six inches in diameter and larger are usually speed-tested. The wheel is rotated at a speed at least 50 percent greater than the maximum allowable operating speed. This is a nondestructive measure of the wheel’s bursting strength.
The same basic processes are used in the manufacture of abrasive bricks, sticks, and formed shapes. These are used as rubbing blocks, sharpening stones, honing stones, and shaped abrasive mediums for tumbling or mass finishing.
Sandpapers (coated abrasive) are the next most significant abrasive product. They consist, basically, of a single layer of abrasive particles held to a flexible backing material by an adhesive bond. The cutting action of coated abrasive products is determined by the abrasive used, the grit size, the density or spacing of the grit, the strength of the adhesive, and the flexibility of the backing material.
Manufacture begins with huge rolls of backing material, either paper, cloth, or a combination of the two. The backing is fed to the making machine where the first layer of adhesive is applied. Next, the layer of abrasive is applied, either by gravity or electrostatically. The electrostatic method orients the slivery type of abrasive used, with the sharp ends facing out. The process can also control the spacing of the grains. This is an advantage in that wide spacing helps to alleviate loading problems when grinding soft, stringy, or gummy materials.
After being coated with the abrasive layer, the product is draped in long festoons in which it partially dries. Then it is run through another sizing operation and a second layer of adhesive is applied. The product is draped, allowed to dry thoroughly, and wound into large-diameter rolls.
The adhesives used to bond the abrasive to the backing are water-soluble, waterproof, or a combination of the two. Water-soluble types are used for dry grinding operations and in household sanding, and occasionally on wood-sanding commercial operations. Resin or resin-over-glue types currently in use have the flexibility associated with the soluble types. The all-resin type is best for severe operations; its properties are such that the heat of grinding actually increases the adhesive’s holding strength.
Sandpaper disks for right-angle grinders are die-cut. Sheets are cut in the standard lengths and widths used in production and household applications. Strips are slit, cut to length, and joined by their ends to make up the coated abrasive belts that have become an essential part of industry, replacing several kinds of abrasive wheels used previously.
Other abrasive products
Other products use the abrasive in the form of grains or powders. In addition to the sizing operation, many types are specifically treated, by calcining, acid, or heating, to make them more suitable for use as lapping abrasive or perhaps as sandblasting grain. For use in lapping and polishing, the abrasive is usually mixed with a vehicle such as mineral or seal oil. Polishing sticks consist of waxes or greases impregnated with various-sized abrasive grains, depending on the particular requirements of the work.
Two materials used for cleaning rather than grinding are still abrasive in nature. Glass beads, pressure blasted onto a surface, remove rust, scale, and carbon. These have replaced much hand cleaning with steel wool. Steel wool still has some applications.
Grinding, the most important abrasive application, is in some way involved in the manufacture of almost every product. This use may be direct, as when the product requires pieces that must be made within close dimensional tolerance limits, or a very smooth surface, or when used on materials too hard to be machined by conventional cutting tools; or indirect, as when, for example, grinding wheels are used to sharpen cutting tools. The materials that are used to make cutting tools must of course be hard in order for the cutting tool to cut and retain its sharp edge. Abrasive grinding wheels are the only means for sharpening the dull edges of such tools.
Grinding wheels in use in industry today rotate at peripheral speeds of almost 300 kilometres (180 miles) per hour. The abrasive wheel may throw a long stream of bright yellow sparks and remove upwards of half a ton of metal per hour while grinding the imperfections from the surface of a bar of stainless steel. Or the grinding wheel may be as small as 0.55 millimetre (0.022 inch) in diameter, may rotate at 150,000 revolutions per minute, and may grind miniature precision ball bearings to accuracies measured in micrometres.
In the automotive industry, only abrasives can produce the tight fit required between piston rings and cylinders to prevent the escape of compressed gasoline vapours. Valves and valve seats are ground. Bearing surfaces in the engine, transmission, and wheels need specific finish, size, and roundness to assure frictionless rotation. These can be achieved only with abrasive tools.
Abrasive machining, the use of abrasives rather than high-speed steel or tungsten carbide cutting tools, makes use of the self-sharpening grinding wheel and eliminates tool sharpening costs. The ability to grind hardened materials without the previously necessary prehardening machining saves intermediate part-handling operations.
Speed and improved grinding systems, machines, and grinding tools are the main reason for the increased importance of grinding. One-hundred-horsepower motors, automatic loading equipment, high-speed grinding wheels removing large amounts of hard-to-grind materials, ultrafine tolerances, and costly machines are part of the new abrasives systems that are capable of extremely high rates of production. Yet the abrasive products portion of the total cost to grind the part may be as low as 5 percent, even though the grinding wheel, with diamond as the abrasive, may cost thousands of dollars. Or the wheel may cost a few pennies and be used to shape a die used in the manufacture of tableware.
Relatively new products, such as plastic bonded tumbling media for mass finishing a multitude of parts, have eliminated time-consuming hand-deburring operations, a plague to the aircraft industry, in which the high cost of labour makes handwork prohibitively expensive. Parts with rough edges are tumbled in a rotating barrel of loose abrasive or preshaped abrasive pieces. As the mass slides, burrs are ground away, surfaces are finished, and edges are smoothed. When the same parts and media are mixed in a vibrating tub, the process becomes even more productive.
Abrasive wheels have replaced steel saws in many places. Thin, abrasive cutoff wheels are capable of sawing through nearly every material known, at rates faster than those of metal saws, while generating less heat and producing a better cut surface. Some space-age metals, because of their hardnesses, can be cut only with abrasive wheels. Granite, marble, slate, and various building blocks are cut to size with diamond abrasive wheels. Grooves for expansion joints and for the reduction of wet-weather skidding accidents are cut in concrete runways and highways by blades with a metal centre, onto which are brazed metal segments with the diamond abrasive mixed throughout.
The sharpening of all types of tools continues to be a major grinding operation. Drills, saws, reamers, milling cutters, broaches, and the great spectrum of knives are kept sharp by abrasives. Coarser-grit products are used for their initial shaping. Finer-grit abrasives produce keener cutting edges. Ultrasharp tools must be hand-honed on natural sharpening or honing stones. Even grinding wheels themselves may require some sharpening. Specially designed steel disks or diamond tools are used to remove dull abrasive cutting edges and create a sharp cutting surface.
In foundries and steel mills, grinding wheels and coated abrasive belts remove the unwanted portions of castings, forgings, and billets. Abrasive grit is pressure-blasted against the metal to clean it in preparation for painting. Metal shot is used on softer metallic castings.
The roster of unusual applications for abrasives includes cutting frozen fish into fish sticks; grinding animal-gut sutures and guitar strings to constant diameters; removing human skin blemishes and birthmarks or shaping bones by plastic surgery; removing spots and discolorations from suede clothing; grinding toothpicks round; and making stairs skidproof by abrasive grain.