Surface roughness of machined wood and advanced engineering materials and its prediction: A review

This article discusses the surface roughness of wood and advanced engineering materials after machining and its prediction. The topics are surface roughness of precision-machined advanced engineering materials, machining of WC and Inconel, rapidly solidified Al alloys, surface roughness of wood materials, and prediction of surface roughness. Findings include that ductile streaks on silicon and glass surfaces ground or lapped with inexpensive machines largely reduced the polishing time to obtain the required surface roughness. Abrasive jet machining could remove the patterns from recycled wafers and improve the surface roughness. The roughness of WC-Co coatings was significantly improved by using the method of fast regime fluidized bed machining. As beryllium is a toxic element, the rapidly solidified Al alloy may be a good insert material to replace BeCu. Higher bonding strengths resulted from rougher surfaces of wood samples. Wood samples had reduced bonding strengths after soaking in water. Optimum artificial neural networks (ANNs) with necessary inputs could accurately predict the roughness values. ANNs trained using particle swarm optimization and genetic algorithms could predict surface roughness better than typical ANNs. Minimum quantity lubrication is a hot research topic to minimize the amount of the fluid for cost and environmental considerations.