Optimization of a Floor Grinding Machine for Uniform Grinding Pattern

Abstract: Husqvarna Construction is one of the leading construction machinery manufacturers in the world. To stay in the forefront, investing in novel methods to model, test & and optimize machinery is crucial. The most important part of development and testing is to bridge the gap between desired and actual results. Model-based Simulation in testing plays a superior role in visualizing possibilities while cutting down the usage of resources. Floor Grinders are common in industrial and commercial settings to achieve desired floor results. Like every machinery, optimization towards achieving better results is a necessity. The purpose of this thesis is to develop a methodology to optimize Husqvarna Constructions’s floor-grinding machine through its grinding pattern and further study & gather data about the key indicators for an optimum grinding pattern. This is done by setting up a grinding pattern simulation of the PG 690 floor grinder on SIMGRIND (Husqvarna Construction’s own simulation application). A metric was developed to determine whether a grinding pattern is good, and by utilizing the metric as an optimization goal, the impact of different machine parameters on the grinding pattern was established. The grinding & travel speeds were viewed as ratios and it was observed that optimized patterns were attained at particular ratios. Another crucial factor that was studied was the impact of oscillations. Further, the impact of grinding head size on the grinding pattern was also studied. The investigation was limited to a simulation study since physical validation opened up several uncertainties beyond the scope of this work. At the end of this work, a few recommendations for developing physical validation setups are made, to test the results of the simulation.