A review on latest trends in ball and roller burnishing processes for enhancing surface finish

Surface finish helps in improving the service life of critical engineering components by increasing corrosion, fatigue, wear and creep resistance. Ball and roller burnishing are found to enhance the surface roughness, microhardness, fatigue, wear and corrosion resistance and to induce compressive residual stresses. With these advantages, ball and roller burnishing processes are currently being applied in automotive, aerospace, biomedical and marine applications. The significant improvement of surface finish leads to evolving ball and roller burnishing processes as a substitute to existing post machining processes. Therefore, the study of ball and roller burnishing processes parameters on the surface roughness is essential. This review paper presents the optimum burnishing parameters of commonly used engineering materials and advanced biomedical materials. Also, surface roughness at optimised condition is presented. It is observed that the process parameters for ball or roller burnishing process to achieve lowest surface roughness are medium burnishing force (50-300 N), low burnishing feed (0.05-0.5 mm/rev), moderate number of passes (2-4) and medium burnishing speed (200-1500 rpm). The results of surface roughness show an average improvement of 85%, highest improvement of 110% and lowest improvement of 67%. Ball burnishing found to provide lower surface roughness than roller burnishing.