Nanofinishing of Microslots on Surgical Stainless Steel by Abrasive Flow Finishing Process: Experimentation and Modeling

Abstract

Miniaturization of components is one of the major demands of the today's technological advancement. Microslots are one of the widely used microfeature found in various industries such as automobile, aerospace, fuel cells and medical. Surface roughness of the microslots plays critical role in high precision applications such as medical field (e.g., drug eluting stent and microfilters). In this paper, abrasive flow finishing (AFF) process is used for finishing of the microslots (width 450 μm) on surgical stainless steel workpiece that are fabricated by electrical discharge micromachining (EDμM). AFF medium is developed in-house and used for performing microslots finishing experiments. Developed medium not only helps in the removal of hard recast layer from the workpiece surfaces but also provides nano surface roughness. Parametric study of microslots finishing by AFF process is carried out with the help of central composite rotatable design (CCRD) method. The initial surface roughness on the microslots wall is in the range of 3.50 ± 0.10 μm. After AFF, the surface roughness is reduced to 192 nm with a 94.56% improvement in the surface roughness. To understand physics of the AFF process, three-dimensional (3D) finite element (FE) viscoelastic model of the AFF process is developed. Later, a surface roughness simulation model is also proposed to predict the final surface roughness after the AFF process. Simulated results are in good agreement with the experimental results.