Burnishing is a cold working technique used as a surface enrichment to meet the desired surface properties of the workpiece. It improves the visual properties, dimensional tolerances, fatigue strength, surface roughness, and hardness of the work material by applying appropriate pressure through a complex ball burnishing tool to cause plastic deformation. In the current work, the mathematical modeling of the burnishing process was carried out to predict surface roughness by considering the process parameters such as contact radius, penetration depth, and elastic rebound. Further, a customized tungsten carbide (W.C.) insert having a hardness of 80 HRC was developed for the burnishing operation. The micro-hardness of the resulting burnished surface improved from 44 to 48 HRC. The surface quality of the tungsten carbide insert improved by up to 17.1 nm through polishing. Several experiments were performed by selecting appropriate process parameters using developed model feedback. The surface quality of the workpiece improved by up to 45 nm, which resulted in automatic improvements in fatigue strength up to seven times that of the virgin material. The results predicted from the mathematical model were in good agreement (less than 5% deviation) with the experimental results. This study helps to understand the surface formation mechanism in the burnishing process in more detail. Additionally, the achieved results show a significant improvement in the surface finish (~95%), indicating the potential of the burnishing process and how fast and cost-effective it is. The novelty of this paper lies in the improvement in surface roughness and the validation of our mathematical model results with the experimental results.

Electrochemical discharge machining (ECDM) is a novel technique for machining non-conductive materials like quartz, soda lime glass, ceramics etc. It combines the machining attributes of the electric discharge machining (EDM) and electrochemical machining (ECM) simultaneously in a single process. Despite numerous experimental studies, few studies are reported covering analytical aspects of the ECDM process. The present study focusses on the development of finite element based thermal model for analyzing the material removal of the different work materials. The model is validated by comparing it with existing literature and a comparison of the different models based on different heat input i.e., uniform distribution and Gaussian distribution is also performed. Results revealed that the material removal rate (MRR) predicted using Gaussian distribution exhibits fair agreement with the earlier reported results. Moreover, the comparative study on MRR is performed using gaussian heat distribution for soda lime glass and quartz material. It is observed that under similar machining conditions, MRR of soda lime glass is higher than the quartz material. The MRR of the both the work materials increases with the increase in electrolyte concentration due to increase in total heat input over the work material.