Chemo Assisted Magnetic Abrasive Finishing: Experimental Investigations

In modern industries with advancement of technology advanced engineering materials are needed to be used like Tungsten, Titanium alloys, ceramics, various composites etc. These materials possess some special characteristics such as high hardness, high wear resistance, high toughness, high strength etc. which make them preferred over conventional materials in modern industries. Due to the stringent properties these materials are difficult to process. Different conventional finishing processes like grinding, lapping, honing, buffing etc. are generally inefficient in finishing these materials. Although processes like abrasive flow machining, magnetic field assisted finishing processes and chemo-mechanical finishing may be used but these may be less productive. Therefore a new process which uses combination of chemical oxidation and magnetic field assisted abrasion (magnetic abrasive finishing) has been conceived in the present work for faster processing.To establish the process experiments have been conducted on tungsten work piece and the effects of various process parameters like percentage weight of abrasive, oxidizing agent concentration, rotational speed of magnet and working gap on process response namely percentage change in average surface roughness value (ΔRa) was recorded. The experiments were planned using Taguchi L9 orthogonal array. Experimental data was analyzed using analysis of variance to understand contribution of various process factors on process response. SEM micrographs have also been obtained to study the surface morphology of the finished work piece. Regression model was developed to predict the percentage change in surface roughness in terms of significant process factors.