Great: Grinding research analysis tool developed by students and researchers with real industrial application

Resumo

There is an urgent need to include teaching active methodologies in practical lessons in some engineering subjects, such as manufacturing processes. Flipped classroom methodologies are suitable for manufacturing practical lessons, in which the concepts are learnt by themselves before the practical lesson, incrementing the interest of students. Moreover, it is of interest to merge teaching and research projects, demonstrating the application of manufacturing lessons to real problems. This good practice would be a win-win situation both from research and teaching points of view. To this end, in the present work it is presented the creation and development of an application/software which monitors the grinding process and analyses acquired data. This application is named GREAT (Grinding REsearch Analysis Tool), which nowadays is used in the industry. It is developed in Python and it is continuously improved depending on the user necessities. GREAT is an easy to use tool and in the same way, a very useful information is obtained in order to evaluate the grinding process, such as, power consumption, generated forces, the temperature in the contact and the tool wear. All this concepts are introduced to students through flipped classroom, and after that they use themselves this industrial tool during practical lessons, which is the most appropriate option to consolidate learning. Likewise, due to the modularity of the software, the students carrying out their end of degree projects, both of Bachelor and Master, participate in the development of the software. Thus, implement the lessons learned and acquire programming and planning skills.