In the era of globalization, the demand of new products with advanced material and process technologies is increasing. Conventional manufacturing techniques are not capable to process the advanced engineering materials with stringent properties. This paper presents a novel approach to finish some advanced engineering materials with stringent properties, which is a challenge for existing conventional machining processes. In this study the positive outcomes of Magnetic Abrasive Finishing (MAF), Chemical-Mechanical Polishing (CMP), and ultrasonic vibrations have been integrated and a novel finishing process Chemo Ultrasonic Assisted Magnetic Abrasive Finishing (CUMAF) has been developed. The machining performance has been enhanced with the process resulting in better surface finish and reduced finishing time. In order to establish the process, an experimental study was done to analyze the influence of five different process variables on surface roughness of workpiece. The response surface methodology and analysis of variance was used to design the experiments and analyze the results respectively. A regression model was also developed and validated, to foresee the process response. Optimization of the model was carried out at the end to obtain the best performance.

Abstract

Knowledge of finishing forces is important in any manufacturing process as the surface integrity of the finished surface is being affected. In the present work finishing force and torque were measured for a recently developed double disk magnetic abrasive finishing process. Investigations have been made to understand the effect of process factors namely upper and lower working gap rotational speed, abrasive weight percentage on the normal finishing force and finishing torque. Experiments were planned and performed based on Taguchi L9 orthogonal array. Analysis of variance has been used to analyze the experimental data. The analysis of the experimental data showed that normal finishing forces is affected most significantly by lower and upper working gap and finishing torque is effected mostly by the lower working gap and rotational speed of the magnetic disk. The surfaces finished by DDMAF process are characterized by SEM and the surface morphology has been correlated to finishing force and torque values.