Estimation of material removal by profilometer measurements in mass finishing

This paper presents a new procedure to estimate the material removal (MR) in such conditions or operations where small amount of material or wear occurs. The monitoring of material removal is essential to understand the machining mechanisms of several processes such as super finishing ones. For example the study of some mass finishing (MF) operations, i. e. the barrel finishing (BF) and the spindle finishing (SF), has been always limited by the difficulty to measure the local surface modification. Thus there is no knowledge about the relationship between process parameters and obtainable surface quality. A particular procedure, based on profilometer measurements, has been employed to characterize local surface morphology. An algorithm automatically finds the most representative peak of the profile. The comparison between the Abbot- Firestone curves, related to peaks achieved in different condition, permits to measure the volume of material removed by the operation. This method overcomes the well-known problem to repositioning the instrument in the same place when the part is moved from machining process to measurement one. In the case of MF, experimental demonstrated the reliability of this methodology to provide the evolution of material removed as a function of working time. Moreover the graphical plot of the representative peak at different times gave important information about machining mechanism. In particular it allowed to verify assumptions regarding the plastic deformation and the peak cutting which take place. © 2014 Trans Tech Publications, Switzerland.