The Effect of Belt Finishing Process Variables on the Topography of Finished Surfaces

The high performance of industrial applications requires increasingly technical functional surfaces, particularly from the point of view of topography and micro texture. Belt finishing is one of the finest machining processes widely used to improve surface texture and to increase wear resistance and fatigue life. It modifies the surface topography in a wide range of roughness and waviness scales, and consequently modifies the functionality of the surface in terms of the bearing area, local plasticity, and durability. In this paper, the topographic signature of the belt finishing process on a wide range of wavelengths of surface topography is analyzed to track the effect of each working parameter, and makes it possible then to understand the principal physical mechanisms activated during the super finishing operations (cutting, ploughing, and friction). To this aim, a multiscale decomposition of the surface topography before and after finishing by using a 2D continuous wavelet transform is introduced.