Evolution of Wear on the Abrasive Tool during the Polishing of Porcelain Tile Using Morphological Space

Abstract

Costs with the polishing process represent nearly a third of what costumers pay for polished floor tiles. This is in part due to the high consumption of cemented-matrix abrasive tools, whose demand is about half kilogram per square meter final product. The present study addresses the wear of such abrasive tools, colloquially known as fickerts in the industrial polishing process of ceramic tiles. The focus was set on the evolution of the fickert ́s surface during polishing. The fickert ́s topography was periodically measured by both optical and confocal microscopy. The abrasive tool was submitted to a sequence of ten polishing steps of one second each. All variations were quantitatively characterized and were successfully represented by means of the morphological space. Such space is in turn composed by two statistical parameters: the skewness and kurtosis, both based on the distribution of heights collected from roughness profiles taken along the fickert ́s active surface. The experimental points showed a linear relationship between skewness and kurtosis, in a very good accordance with the behavior expected for typical abrasive wear.