For stationary dressers and form rollers, depth of dressing cut, aed, defines engagement depth of the dressing diamonds with the grinding tool in normal direction. For profile rollers radial dressing feed, frd, has the same implication.
Grinding wheel wear and grit size define the depth of dressing cut [AVER82]. The depth of dressing cut should be smaller than grit size to ensure that the grinding tool structure stays connected [MARI04]. One strategy is to conduct final dressing strokes with no depth of cut, so that the elastic deformations between grinding wheel and dressing tool are leveled out and the wheel topography is smoothened [MALK08, MARI04, SHAW96]. The same effect takes place if profile rollers are kept rotating at the end of the dressing process without further radial infeed.
The influence of depth of dressing cut is not homogeneous in the literature. Messer, Marinescu et al. found an increase of the theoretical effective grinding wheel roughness increases slightly with the depth of dressing cut [MARI04, MESS83]. Inasaki [INAS77] obtained that the workpiece roughness increases degressively. Larger depth of dressing cut leads to more splintering of abrasive grits [STUF96] and to shorter instationary wear phase of the grinding tool [SCHU96].