Development of polymer abrasive medium for nanofinishing of microholes on surgical stainless steel using abrasive flow finishing process

Abstract

The finishing operation completes the manufacturing cycle of a component. Depending on the level of finish (micro and nano) required on the component surface, different finishing processes are employed. Several components employed in medical, automotive and chemical industries use different types of passages for the flow of fluid. The surface roughness of such passages decides the functionality of the component. Drug-eluting stents are one of the recent advancements in the medical industry. They possess microholes for release of the drugs to the point of cure. Microholes are mostly fabricated by thermal-based micromachining processes that generate metallurgically destroyed surface layers with high surface roughness. Later, these are polished using chemical or electrochemical polishing techniques, which chemically destroy the quality of the surface. These metallurgically and chemically modified (destroyed/changed) rough surfaces on the microhole wall can cause contamination of the drug. So in this article, microholes of diameter 850 ± 30 µm are fabricated in surgical stainless steel (SS 316L) workpieces using the electric discharge micromachining process. Machined microholes are finished by employing a non-traditional finishing process called the abrasive flow finishing process. Instead of using a commercially available expensive abrasive flow finishing medium, the economic medium is fabricated in-house, and its rheological study is carried out. Machining process produces microholes with a surface roughness of about 1.40 ± 0.10 µm. Later, by finishing of microholes with the abrasive flow finishing process, the surface roughness is reduced to 150 nm (percentage surface roughness improvement of about 88.53%). Therefore, the abrasive flow finishing process is a viable alternative to chemical-based polishing processes as it removes the recast layer and achieves nanosurface roughness.