Experimental Investigation of Vibration Assisted Cylindrical–Magnetic Abrasive Finishing of Aluminum Workpiece

Abstract

Machining by abrasion is the most labor intensive and critical machining process to provide high quality finish on the parts. Abrasive finishing operations are usually applied as the last machining operation and its importance becomes more vital when the workpiece material is difficult-to-machine. Recently the promising processes of abrasion for difficult-to-machine materials have been developed. Magnetic abrasive finishing (MAF) is such process which utilizes the magnetic energy for finishing. During MAF, the workpiece is set between the two magnetic poles, and the working area between the workpiece and each pole is filled with the mixture of ferromagnetic particle and abrasives. The process has the wide variety of industrial application due to low specific energy consumptions. This work reports about the development of new vibration assisted cylindrical–magnetic abrasive finishing (VAC–MAF) setup and the experimental investigation of various process parameters viz. frequency of vibration, rotational speed, size of the abrasive particles, and magnetic flux density on VAC–MAF setup during finishing of aluminium workpieces.