Within the group of surface plastic deformation processes, roller and ball burnishing are methods for improving metal surface roughness, surface hardness and dimensional accuracy. These are cold-working processes that do not involve material removal, and that produce work hardening of the part surface.
The main originality of the project is to join all the partners need to apply rapidly the mechanical treatments to high added value components of train axle, automotive, moulds and dies production. The main technique is hydrostatic ball burnishing but also roller of new coatings for dies have been studied.
In this project four types of SME are involved: machine tool manufacturers (Danobat and Kondia), which can be suppliers of the technologies as options in lathes or milling centres, end-users as Remsa, interested in improving the performance of moulds in the zamak parts processing and the final quality of injected parts, a PVD job coater (Gazela) for the development and application of innovative PVD coatings on moulds used in zamak parts stamping, and materials engineering services (Inpromat), which provide a service to other companies. In short, the objectives are:
- To offer mechanical treatments, specially burnishing, for manufacturers of train axle machine tools, because rolling improve the surface roughness to the level of grinding.
- To offer an option to moulds and dies manufacturers, since burnishing eliminate some of the final hand polishing.
- To optimise the blasting of Zamak components.
- To offer an engineering service to exam the components integrity and functional behaviour.
- To optimise the quality of components obtained by spinning, looking for new post-process techniques to improve the functional features.
- To optimise the total cost of the parts starting from the tool, the injection process, its yield, and pre-finishing processes requested.
