Article
Version 2
This version is not peer-reviewed
Hydrostatic Bandsaw Blade Guides for Natural Stone Cutting Applications
Version 1
: Received: 21 January 2020 / Approved: 22 January 2020 / Online: 22 January 2020 (09:32:18 CET)
Version 2 : Received: 22 February 2020 / Approved: 24 February 2020 / Online: 24 February 2020 (12:23:56 CET)
Version 2 : Received: 22 February 2020 / Approved: 24 February 2020 / Online: 24 February 2020 (12:23:56 CET)
A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.
Ahsan, A.; Kenney, K.; Kröger, J.; Böhm, S. Hydrostatic Bandsaw Blade Guides for Natural Stone-Cutting Applications. J. Manuf. Mater. Process. 2020, 4, 20. Ahsan, A.; Kenney, K.; Kröger, J.; Böhm, S. Hydrostatic Bandsaw Blade Guides for Natural Stone-Cutting Applications. J. Manuf. Mater. Process. 2020, 4, 20.
Abstract
In a bandsaw machine the blade guides provide additional stiffness and help to align the blade near the cutting region. Typically these are either in form of blocks made of carbide or ceramics or as sealed bearings. Abrasive particles, generated while cutting hard and brittle materials like natural stones, settle between the contact surfaces of the guides and the blade causing wear and premature failure. The hydrostatic guide system as presented in this work, is a contactless blade guiding method that uses force of several pressurized water jets to align the blade to the direction of the cut. For this investigation, cutting tests were performed on a marble block using a galvanic diamond coated bandsaw blade with the upper roller guides replaced by hydrostatic guides. The results show that the hydrostatic guides help to reduce the passive force while cutting to a constant near zero in contrast to the traditional guides. This also resulted in reduced surface roughness of the stone plates that were cut indicating a reduction in lateral vibration of the band. Additionally, it has also been shown that using hydrostatic guides the bandsaw blade can be tilted to counter the bandsaw drift opening opportunities for further research in active alignment control. This original research work has shown that the hydrostatic guide systems are capable of replacing and in fact perform better than state of the art bearing or block guides particularly for stone cutting applications.
Keywords
Hydrostatic; Blade guides; Bandsaw; Diamond blade; Natural stone; Sawing
Subject
Engineering, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering
Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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