Ceramic Alumina Abrasive Performance and Test Method

Different ceramic alumina abrasive from different manufacturer has slightly different performance, mainly focus on below aspect:

These parameter will directly affect the grinding performance of Ceramic Alumina Abrasive. Please refer to below table:

For abrasive grains, 3 key characters are hardness, toughness and sharpness. Below is map of different material.

When design a grinding tool, it’s needed to consider the character of different abrasive grains to achieve better performance.

Ceramic Alumina Technical Roadmap

From the ceramic alumina abrasive develop at 1980s by 3M and Norton. Actually there are two kind of technical routines. One is call “Seeded” process, Norton mainly follow this routine. Another one is “No seed” process, 3M mainly follow this direction. All of other manufacturers follow one of these routines. The difference is crystalline structure due to different chemical additive used. Detailed difference as below shows:

The production process is similar, the difference of crystalline structure is due to different additive. Below is the process of ceramic alumina abrasive.

Two crystalline structures have different application direction, for layer stack structure it has more sharpness and ball stack structure has more durability. One thing to comment the blue color of ceramic alumina abrasive is due to about 0.1% Cobalt added. Color does not affect any performance of grains. It is mainly for commercial purpose.