Surface texturing of axisymmetric thin-walled cylindrical components: A review

Surface texturing plays a pivotal role in mechanical, tribological, thermal, and many more multi-disciplinary engineering and medical applications. Thin-walled components offer low weight-to-volume ratio for desired strength, stiffness, and performance. Such textured parts are useful for weight reduction, energy efficiency, and resource saving strategies. High strength to weight ratio and resistance to bending and buckling are the uniqueness of axisymmetric thin-walled cylindrical components. However, thin-walled parts are sensitive to stresses due to clamping and texturing forces as they get deformed and lose form accuracies of cylindricity, circularity, and straightness. This review work focuses on; the requirement of textured axisymmetric thin-walled cylindrical components and their challenges. Summarization of different geometries of texture asperities and categorization into discrete and non-discrete aspects has been done. This is followed by a summarization of texturing requirements into various verticals and a classification of various texturing techniques based on their working principles. Further, some selected texturing techniques have been discussed; and suitable usage have been proposed for such textured axisymmetric thin-walled cylindrical components, which are challenging in terms of stress, deformation, and form accuracies. This comprehensive review analyzes 229 peer-reviewed articles from 25 distinct publishing houses, covering publications from 1976 to 2025, to identify emerging trends and technologies in surface texturing. Electrical discharge centerless grinding; a hybrid process that is relatively a nascent technique and has been found to be promising for stress free texturing of axisymmetric thin-walled cylindrical components.