Roughness variability in the honing process of steel cylinders with CBN metal bonded tools

Herein are presented roughness results of honing of steel cylinders with cubic boron nitride (CBN) abrasive tools. Different honing parameters such as honing stone pressure against the workpiece, tangential speed of the honing head as well as grain size of the abrasive stone were varied in order to determine their influence on the surface roughness of cylinders. Four different strategies were implemented to measure and characterise roughness of inner surfaces of honed steel cylinders. The variability in results obtained with each strategy is compared. The first three strategies consist in measuring roughness at one, three or nine points, respectively, which are uniformly distributed over a circumference located at one of the cylinder ends. The fourth strategy is based on the third one: it entails measuring roughness at nine points, and then subsequently filtering results to eliminate any extreme roughness value lying outside the boundaries set by Chauvenet's criterion. At each point of measurement, roughness is measured in the direction of the cylinder generatrix. It was verified that the larger the number of measurement points, the lower the variability in roughness values obtained. Therefore, it is recommended to make at least nine measurements per cylinder and to filter values to avoid any non-representative, outlier value. The variability in these values was quantified firstly according to relative differences. Secondly, variability was quantified by means of the coefficient of variation which provides smaller values than the relative difference, although less intuitive and less direct.