Experimental study on shear thickening polishing method for curved surface

Abstract

Abstract:A new polishing method shear thickening polishing (STP) was proposed to improve the polishing efficiency in the process to obtain extremely smooth curved surfaces. A non-Newtonian fluid with shear thickening property was utilised as the base fluid of the polishing slurry, in which the abrasives were dispersed. In this study, the influence of polishing speed, abrasive concentration and abrasive size on the surface roughness and material removal rate were investigated by experiments. The experimental results revealed that the polishing speed has the greatest influence on the polishing effect. With the increase of the polishing speed, the material removal rate increases rapidly and smoother surfaces with better roughness can be obtained. Abrasive concentration affects the polishing results in a manner that is similar to polishing speed. Abrasive size seems to have no effect on the surface roughness, but material removal rate increases as the abrasive size decreases. Finally, surface roughness of bearing steel work-piece (Ø35 mm) was reduced rapidly from Ra = 105.95 nm to Ra = 6.99 nm after one hours' processing under the appropriate conditions. Keywords: polishing; non-Newtonian fluid; shear thickening; curved surface. 82 B. Lyu et al.Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Lyu, B., Dong, C., Yuan, J., Sun, L., Li, M. and Dai, W. (2017) Min Li is currently a PhD candidate in National Engineering Research Center for High Efficiency Grinding, Hunan University. His current research is curved surface polishing.Weitao Dai is currently a Master student of Ultra-Precision Machining Centre, Zhejiang University of Technology. His main field of study is curved surface polishing utilising non-Newtonian fluid. This paper is a revised and expanded version of a paper entitled 'Experimental study on shear thickening polishing method for curved surface' presented at

Simulation study on polishing of gear surfaces in non-Newtonian fluid

“…The suggested method is one type of the non-Newtonian fluids and applied to polish the complicated shapes. In this method, the fluid pressure is generated by shear thickening of the polishing fluid when it is moved on the machining process 21,22 . As the results, the surface quality of gear and efficiency of the machining process were greatly improved.…”