Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
No Thumbnail Available
Publication

Prediction of the Roughness Reduction in Centrifugal Disc Finishing of Additive Manufactured Parts Based on Discrete Element Method

2022 , Kopp, Marco , Uhlmann, Eckart

One major drawback of additive manufacturing is the poor surface quality of parts, which negatively affects mechanical and tribological properties. Therefore, a surface finishing is necessary in most cases. Due to a high material removal rate, centrifugal disc finishing is a promising mass finishing operation for an effective surface finishing of additive manufactured parts. However, due to machining the workpieces in a freely movable manner, the process is hardly controllable, and the process design is often based on time-consuming and cost-intensive trial-and-error approaches. Especially when it comes to the machining of complex-shaped workpieces, finishing results are barely predictable. Therefore, the aim of this study is to set up a numerical simulation of the centrifugal disc finishing based on the Discrete Element Method (DEM) to predict finishing results. A procedure to determine the required DEM input parameters is presented and the simulation was validated using a freely movable force sensor. The results of the finishing experiments with additive manufactured workpieces made of Ti-6Al-4V were correlated with the simulated results. The derived correlation was used to predict local differences in the roughness reduction, which occurred when finishing workpieces with a limited accessibility to the surface. As a result, it is concluded that the complex relationship between the type of media, the accessibility to the surface, and the achievable finishing results can be modeled using the DEM.