Effect of Roller Burnishing and Slide Roller Burnishing on Surface Integrity of AISI 316 Steel: Theoretical and Experimental Comparative Analysis

Abstract

The article presents a new method called slide roller burnishing (SRB) for the cold working of cylindrical surfaces on machine tools implemented with a novel multi-functional device. The machined material is chromium–nickel austenitic stainless steel. The deforming element is a toroidal roller whose axis crosses that of the workpiece. As a result, a relative sliding velocity occurs in the contact zone between the roller and the machined surface. The sliding velocity vector is set using the burnishing device. The theoretical background of SRB is presented. When the two axes are parallel, the well-known roller burnishing (RB) method is implemented. Thus, RB is a special case of SRB. Both processes are realized using the multi-functional burnishing device. The RB process was studied experimentally and optimized according to three criteria, based on the relationship between the surface integrity and operating behavior of the respective component, to achieve three processes: smoothing, hardening, and mixed burnishing. Using the optimal RB parameters obtained, the dependence of the results of SRB on the crossing angle was investigated and optimized. A comparative analysis was performed between the optimized RB and SRB processes (respectively for their three variants: smoothing, hardening, and mixed) based on geometrical and physical–mechanical characteristics of the surface integrity. The main advantage of the SRB is that it provides smaller height roughness parameters (improvement by 42%) and a higher surface microhardness (improvement by 7%) than RB.