Hand and Abrasive Flow Polished Tungsten Carbide Die: Optimization of Surface Roughness, Polishing Time and Comparative Analysis in Wire Drawing

Raman Kumar; Sehijpal Singh; Vivek Aggarwal; Sunpreet Singh; Danil Yurievich Pimenov; Khaled Giasin; Krzysztof Nadolny

doi:10.3390/ma15041287

Hand and Abrasive Flow Polished Tungsten Carbide Die: Optimization of Surface Roughness, Polishing Time and Comparative Analysis in Wire Drawing

Materials (Basel). 2022 Feb 9;15(4):1287. doi: 10.3390/ma15041287.

Authors

Raman Kumar¹, Sehijpal Singh¹, Vivek Aggarwal², Sunpreet Singh³, Danil Yurievich Pimenov⁴, Khaled Giasin⁵, Krzysztof Nadolny⁶

Affiliations

¹ Department of Mechanical and Production Engineering, Guru Nanak Dev Engineering College, Ludhiana 141006, India.
² Department of Mechanical Engineering, IKGPTU Main Campus, Kapurthala 144603, India.
³ Department of Mechanical Engineering, Chandigarh University, Ghauruan 140413, India.
⁴ Department of Automated Mechanical Engineering, South Ural State University, Lenin Prosp. 76, 454080 Chelyabinsk, Russia.
⁵ School of Mechanical and Design Engineering, University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth PO1 3DJ, UK.
⁶ Department of Production Engineering, Koszalin University of Technology, Raclawicka 15-17, 75-620 Koszalin, Poland.

Abstract

This research work highlights the benefits of abrasive flow polishing (AFP) applied to tungsten carbide dies compared with conventional hand polishing (HP). An indigenous experimental set-up for AFP was developed. The effect of prominent process parameters viz. extrusion pressure, number of cycles, and abrasive particle concentration on the final surface roughness, percentage improvement in surface roughness, and polishing time was investigated by Taguchi-designed experiments. The multi-objective optimization (MOO) was performed using the Taguchi-TOPSIS-Equal weight approach to find the respective optimized AFP parametric settings. A set of skilled operators performed the conventional HP of dies, and the best hand-polished (HPed) die was selected using the TOPSIS technique. The operational performance of the HPed dies and the abrasive flow polished (AFPed) dies were compared on the three-stage wire drawing operation. The results revealed that AFP's surface resulted in a better-quality surface than hand polishing with a 27.06% improvement in surface roughness. Furthermore, AFP can reduce the dependency on costly and tricky-to-locate skilled operators, with a reasonable amount of time saving (about 87.05%). Overall, the study's findings show that abrasive flow polishing of dies is fast and cost-effective.

Keywords: TOPSIS; abrasive flow machining; abrasive flow polishing; hand polishing; polishing time; surface roughness; tungsten carbide; wire drawing die.