Revolved Surface Finishing with Smart Fluid Abrasives

The smart fluid abrasive (SFA) is a suspension of magnetically soft ferromagnetic particles and nonmagnetic abrasives in a carrier liquid. When the SFA is exposed to a magnetic field, a rapid and reversible fluid-to-solid phase transition occurs. Based on these distinctive features of SFA, a new type of precision finishing technology that can be used in the finishing of the revolved surface has been developed, and the finishing results have been proved in our experiments. In this paper, the SFA finishing mechanism and finishing process are presented, the influence of some basic parameters such as magnetic strength, size of abrasives, time of processing and relative motion between abrasives and working surface of work pieces are discussed as well.