Study of the mechanism of the burnishing process with cylindrical polycrystalline diamond tools

Abstract It is widely recognized that the chipless finishing process–the burnishing process can be used efficaciously to reduce the surface roughness and increase the surface hardness of a workpiece. But most of previous works published on the burnishing process concentrated on experimental researches in the last few years. The mechanism of the burnishing process which is very important for spreading the burnishing process has been explored based on contact mechanics. The simulation curve is obtained from a theoretical model. Theoretical results are compared with the experiments in which aluminum alloy LY12 was selected as material for making the specimens and a new cylindrical polycrystalline diamond tool developed by us was used for the burnishing process. The comparison shows that the theoretical model is basically correct in describing the burnishing process.