Surface integrity enhancement of austenitic stainless steel treated by ultrasonic burnishing with two burnishing tips

A set of ultrasonic burnishing equipment with two different burnishing tips was designed and manufactured, with which a series of experiments were performed to explore the effects of process parameters and burnishing tips on the surface integrity of austenitic stainless steel material being treated by ultrasonic burnishing (UB). Based on the experiment data, the two surface treatments, i.e. UB with ball tip and UB with roller tip, were comparatively assessed together with the other two surface machining methods of fine turning and grinding. As a further study, a microscopic FE model was built to investigate the three-dimensional transient stress and strain field inside the being treated material. It was found that parameter combination is determinative to surface finishing in UB process, and static pressure and burnishing pass are supposed to be the two most significant parameters for surface integrity of the treated sample. On the whole, roller tip is more preferable to achieve good surface enhancement than ball tip. The superposition of ultrasonic vibration leads to the dynamic change of the stress and strain field in UB, resulting in the oscillating propagation of stress wave inside the material, which gives explanation for the good performance of UB than that of conventional burnishing without ultrasonic.