Experimental Investigation on the Effect of Surface Shape and Orientation in Magnetic Field Assisted Mass Polishing

Magnetic field assisted finishing (MFAF) technology has been widely used in industries such as aerospace, biomedical, and the optical field for both external and internal surface finishing due to its high conformability to complex surfaces and nanometric surface finishing. However, most of the MFAF methods only allow polishing piece-by-piece, leading to high post-processing costs and long processing times with the increasing demand for high precision products. Hence, a magnetic field-assisted mass polishing (MAMP) method was recently proposed, and an experimental investigation on the effect of surface posture is presented in this paper. Two groups of experiments were conducted with different workpiece shapes, including the square bar and roller bar, to examine the effect of surface orientation and polishing performance on different regions. A simulation of magnetic field distribution and computational fluid dynamics was also performed to support the results. Experimental results show that areas near the chamber wall experience better polishing performance, and the surface parallel or inclined to polishing direction generally allows better shearing and thus higher polishing efficiency. Both types of workpieces show notable polishing performance where an 80% surface roughness improvement was achieved after 20-min of rough polishing and 20-min of fine polishing reaching approximately 20 nm.