ABSTRACT
Surface quality of the finished products is a vital factor used in automobile, aerospace, and biomedical applications etc. The various components used in above applications have consisted of small passages for the proper flowing of fluids. Housing is a major component used in aircraft to prevent the undesirable loss of a fluid or gas. It is very difficult to finish its internal passages via traditional methods. In this paper, magnetic abrasive flow machining process (MAFM) has been used for internal finishing of aircraft housings. Initially, housing is made with Al-6061 alloy composites reinforced with SiC/Al2O3 and rare earth oxides (REOs). To explore the influence of various parameters such as magnetic flux density, number of cycles and extrusion pressure on the change in surface roughness of housing, a Box–Behnken design approach has been applied. The optimum value of change in surface roughness of Al-6061 hybrid composites was observed to be 1.03 μm with percentage improvement in surface finish of 68.2% using desirability approach. This percentage improvement was observed at magnetic flux density of 0.75 Tesla, numbers of cycles 172 and extrusion pressure 4.13 MPa. Further, specimens were examined using atomic force microscopy for 3-D surface profile.
