Experimental investigations into transient roughness reduction in ball-end magneto-rheological finishing process

Ball-end magneto-rheological finishing (BEMRF) process is a variant of magneto-rheological finishing (MRF) which is capable of finishing magnetic as well as nonmagnetic materials to finish surfaces up to the order of nanometers. The development of this process has been fairly recent and the literature has focused on quantifying and analyzing the effects of finishing on different materials with it. This research work presents a time-based roughness reduction study of BEMRF process to find out the behavior of machining parameters in finishing over lengthy time intervals. EN31 steel has been chosen as the work material for this study. Firstly, a machining parameter optimization is carried out for finishing of EN31 steel with BEMRF process. A detailed time-based experimental study is then carried out to find the effect of time on finishing with BEMRF process. The time-based study revealed a transient roughness reduction phenomenon in which a particular set of machining parameters was capable of reducing the surface roughness only up to a limited roughness value. The study concluded a database for finishing of EN31 steel with BEMRF process which can be used for optimum time-based finishing with BEMRF process.