Finishing of workpieces is carried out with grinding tools mostly. These can be discs, shafts, and wheels with a certain profile. In every case there will be a loss of abrasive material causing an undesired change of the original shape. After a certain amount of grinding cycles the grinding tool isn't sharp any longer or the precision of the surface has degraded. At least at that moment the grinding tool has to be restored to the original condition. This process is called dressing. Depending on the quality of the grinding tools, different technics are used. It is differentiated between dressing with fixed and with rotating tools. For dressing of high quality abrasives ( e.g. CBN) rotating tools are the preferred choice.

A dressing system generally consists of a dressing spindle, a dressing tool and the driving high frequency converter.
Due to the required high precision of this process, all components have to be of highest possible quality. Therefor these systems are matched perfectly. In this case you speak of dressing systems.
To have the best possible result with less possible losses at the grinding wheel, dressing by noise is required. For this reason high quality dressing systems additionally use an AE ,acoustic emission system, for monitoring.
The contact/touching of the dressing wheel with the grinding wheel creates a high frequent noise. This noise (acoustic emission) can be detected with microphones mounted within the spindle. An external control unit evalutes these signals, displays it, and outputs control signals to a plc. So it is possible to take off only as much material as required for full restoration of the grinding wheel, and not a fixed oversized amount. With the help of this AE-systems the efficency of the grinding process can be increased significantly. This effects in saving costs because of the very economic treatment with the costy CBN abrasives. The loss of material at grinding wheel is reduced with the consequence of prolonging its useful lifetime and to be changed less frequent. The production costs are minimized, because the standstill times for changing the grinding wheels are decreased.