Abstract
Electrochemical surface finishing is a highly scalable manufacturing process that traditionally uses viscous, non-aqueous and/or highly acidic electrolytes to achieve the desired surface profiles on metallic parts, with the addition of aggressive, hazardous chemical species to remove the oxide film on strongly passive materials. An emerging approach applies pulse and pulse reverse electric fields to control current distribution, mitigate oxide film formation and achieve the desired surface finish, in the presence of environmentally benign and simple chemistries. This approach lowers the cost of the manufacturing process, and improves process robustness. After a brief discussion of electrochemical surface finishing processes, case studies that describe deburring of automotive gears and electropolishing of semiconductor valves and superconducting radio frequency cavities are presented in this article.