During grinding processes, numerous grains interact with the workpiece material producing mechanical and thermal loads on the surface. In the field of thermal simulation of grinding processes, a widely used approach is to substitute numerous cutting edges by a single moving distributed heat source of a specific geometrical shape referring to the theory of Carslaw and Jaeger. This heat source is then moved across the modelled workpiece according to the specific kinematics of the grinding

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... The geometrical shape of the substituted heat source can usually be determined using different approaches, e. g., predefined distribution functions or, more precisely, based on measurements of the shear stress within the contact zone. Referring to the state of the art, it is not possible to measure the shear stress within the contact zone during internal traverse grinding with roughing and finishing zone because of its very complex engagement conditions and the non-rectangular shape of its contact zone. In this work, a novel approach to determining a heat source distribution based on a geometric-kinematic simulation for internal traverse grinding is presented. This simulation identifies the ideal geometrical interaction of workpiece and grinding wheel. For this purpose, the specific material removal rate for each grain is calculated and accumulated with respect to the contact zone resulting in a three-dimensional thermal load distribution. This heat source can be used in finite element simulations to determine the thermal load on the workpiece.