Effect of magnetic abrasive finishing with steel balls on the surface improvement of Aluminium alloy

The magnetic abrasive finishing process (MAF) is a superfinishing process and has many merits over the traditional one. The majority of research conducted utilized ferromagnetic materials with abrasive particles to perform finishing for various materials. This study aims to investigate the effectiveness of hard steel balls such as ferro-magnetic abrasives in finishing AA 1100 aluminium flat alloys. Three parameters were selected with three levels as independent MAF inputs, namely: rotational speed (270, 600, 930 rpm), current (0.5, 1, 1.5 Amp), and finishing time (6, 9, 12 min.). For the purpose of comparison, the same parameters and levels were applied for traditional MAF, using a mixture of iron powder and tungsten carbides having a mesh size of 320 and 200 µm with equal ratios. The performance of the process was evaluated based on the improvement in surface roughness. Taguchi method with L9 orthogonal array was applied to investigate the influence of controllable parameters on the achieved surface roughness. The results revealed the superiority of MAF with steel ball over traditional MAF. The maximum surface improvement (ΔRa) was 0.082 μm for steel ball compared with 0.054 μm for traditional MAF. Rotational speed was the most significant parameter for both processes. The most significant parameter for both processes was the rotational speed with high contributions of 89.06% and 88.42% for both processes.