FINITE ELEMENT APPROACH FOR THE PREDICTION OF RESIDUAL STRESSES IN ALUMINUM WORK PIECES PRODUCED BY ROLLER BURNISHING

Burnishing is a cold rolling process without removal of metal. A set of precision rollers are used to roll on the component surface with adequate pressure. As a result all the premachined peaks gets compressed into valleys thus giving a mirror like surface finish. Surface finish is considered as important factor for the sliding surfaces, in order to have long life. In Burnishing, compressive residual stresses are induced during the process. In the present work, experimental work is carried out to reduce the surface roughness of a specially fabricated aluminum work piece, by roller burnishing process on lathe. High carbon, high chromium roller is used as tool in the roller burnishing process. Various experiments are conducted to investigate the variation of surface roughness (Ra) with respect to the variation of burnishing force. Finite element model is developed to compare the experimental results. The results are found to coincide with the values got from the experimental readings, and the variations are less than 10 %.