Abstract
Surface characteristics play a very important role in medical implants and among surface features, surface roughness is very effective in some medical applications. Among the various methods used to improve surface roughness, magnetic abrasive finishing (MAF) process has been widely used in medical engineering. In this study, the effect of abrasive particle morphology along with four other process parameters, including type of work metal, finishing time, speed of finishing operation, and the type of abrasive powder were experimentally evaluated. Full factorial technique was used for design of experiment. Three commonly used metals in orthopedic implants i.e., Ti-6Al-4V alloy, AZ31 alloy and austenitic stainless-steel 316LVM, were selected for this study. Also, two types of magnetic abrasive particles with different shapes (spherical and rod-shaped) were considered in the experiments. The results of the experiments indicated that the morphology of the abrasive particles and the finishing time had the greatest effect on surface roughness and using rod-shaped abrasive particles resulted in better surface quality comparing to the spherical particles. Besides, the surface quality of steel 316LVM after MAF was the best among the other examined metals. Interaction plots of ANOVA also showed that interactions of material with morphology of abrasive particles, and material with machining time were found to be reasonably significant.
Highlights
Magnetic abrasive finishing (MAF), as one of the dedicated process of super finishing has recently received the attention of many researchers
Since among the influential parameters on MAF performance, the effect of morphology of magnetic abrasive particles has not been studied so far, this paper aims to investigate the effect of this parameter on the surface quality obtained by MAF along with other parameters, including the type of metal, the time of polishing, the speed of polishing and the type of abrasive powder (Al2O3, TiO2)
Based on the results presented above, the following conclusions can be drawn. – According to the ANOVA table, the morphology of abrasive particles and the machining time are the most dominating parameters, making the contribution to the total variability of as much as 30.65% and 11.08%, respectively
Summary
Magnetic abrasive finishing (MAF), as one of the dedicated process of super finishing has recently received the attention of many researchers. It was invented in 1930s and has been used so far for both internal and external surfaces of cylindrical work-pieces and flat surfaces made of magnetic or non-magnetic materials [1]. Magnetic field in the working clearance causes to form a brush named magnetic abrasive flexible brush (MAFB). The function of this brush is like a multi-point cutter for finishing operation.
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