Surface improvement of shafts by the diamond burnishing and ultrasonic burnishing techniques

The demand for good surface quality and good fatigue resistance of engineering components is becoming ever greater. Mechanical surface treatments are performed to improve the surface properties and quality of cylindrical workpieces. In this article, the surfaces produced by two different surface treatment methods are evaluated in terms of their surface integrity. The processes are diamond burnishing and ultrasonic burnishing. Both diamond burnishing and ultrasonic burnishing are fast, simple and economical cold-working processes that provide good surface quality and hardness. This paper examines the residual stresses, the changes in the surface quality and the changes in the surface hardness of the workpieces that have been finished via diamond burnishing and ultrasonic burnishing processes. It is extremely important to know what effect the methods have on the residual state of the material. The results demonstrate that it is possible to achieve reductions of as much as 78% to 94% in surface roughness (Ra) via the diamond burnishing and ultrasonic burnishing processes.