Smoothing, deep, or mixed diamond burnishing of low-alloy steel components – optimization procedures

Diamond burnishing (DB) is a static mechanical surface treatment based on severe surface plastic deformation aimed at significant improvement in the surface integrity and operating properties of the treated component. Very often, DB is unjustifiably perceived of as typical smoothing burnishing. In the present article, it is shown that DB can be conducted as smoothing, deep, or mixed burnishing depending on the particular combination of process governing factors employed. Optimizations of the DB process for 41Cr4 steel under different criteria are conducted in order to obtain the optimal parameters of different DB processes. The choices of governing factors and objective functions (roughness and fatigue limits), which are obtained on the basis of planned experiments and regression analyses, are fully justified. By means of one-objective optimizations, the uncompromising optimum values of the objective functions and the corresponding optimum values of the governing factors of smoothing and deep DB processes are obtained. A new optimization procedure for solving a multi-objective optimization task is developed in order to obtain compromise optimal values simultaneously with the objective functions and governing factors of the mixed DB process. In order to highlight the advantages of the proposed optimization procedure, the multi-objective task solution is compared with the results obtained via some known methods, i.e., the compromise weight vector and function of the losses methods.