Piezoelectric Active Damper for Surface Roughness Improvement in Hard Turning Processes

Abstract Surface roughness and profile accuracy on rolling or sliding surfaces are critical for the wear and fatigue of a component. A high roughness or poor profile accuracy results in higher friction and higher wear rate of the surface. One of the major factors affecting the surface roughness is chatter vibrations. This paper presents a novel design and development of an active damper for chatter suppression of hard turning processes using a piezoelectric actuator and strain signal for chatter detection. The active damper consists of a piezoelectric actuator with an embedded strain gauge for measuring the vibration displacement. In this work, the radial strain signal as a result of radial chatter vibrations from the strain gauge is used as a feedback signal to the actuator using a feedback controller. The experimental results showed a significant suppression in chatter vibrations and improvement of surface roughness using the proposed active damper. The details of the tool design, control design, hardware implementation and system validation are given hereinafter.