Influence of ball-burnishing on roughness, hardness and corrosion resistance of AISI 1045 steel

Abstract The ball-burnishing process involves a surface plastic deformation that improves the physical-mechanical properties of manufactured parts. In this work, was used to study the influence of the main parameters of the ball-burnishing process on features such as mean surface roughness and hardness of cylindrical AISI 1045 steel samples. The experimental stage was based on a 3 3 factorial design and the Response Surface Methodology. An equation was proposed to model the mean roughness in the studied experimental region. Moreover, the polarization technique (Tafel) and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) were used to evaluate the burnishing process effect on corrosion resistance of a sample machined with the optimal burnishing parameters obtained herein. Finally, burnishing process effect on the phase change was also evaluated by using X-ray diffraction. As a result, the factor that showed higher influence was the burnishing force for both features, roughness and hardness. The data shows that it is possible to reduce the surface roughness from 3.51 μm to 0.61 μm and to increase the hardness from 202 HB to 236 HB using ball-burnishing process, and to improve the corrosion resistance in AISI-1045 steel.