A newly developed coal-ash-based AFM media characterization for abrasive flow finishing of FDM printed hemispherical ball shape

Waste vegetable oils are highly valued for industrial uses. Thermal processing of these oils alters their physicochemical properties, necessitating an examination of how temperature affects their qualities. The idea of abrasive flow machining (AFM) media to finish any complex shapes and surfaces can also be accomplished using waste vegetable oils and waste coal ash. In this paper, to finish FDM parts, waste coal ash was used to develop an environmentally friendly and sustainable AFM finishing media that contains SiC powder as abrasive particles, waste vegetable oil as a liquid synthesizer, and glycerin as an additive. Taguchi's orthogonal array L9-based experimental design was used to optimize the viscosity of AFM media for better surface improvement. One of the fundamental limitations of fused filament fabrication or fused deposition modeling (FFF/FDM) is the inherent surface quality of the process, which is particularly tied to the layer thickness utilized during manufacture. The FDM technique was used in the current study to fabricate the ABS (acrylonitrile–butadiene–styrene) material's hemispherical ball-shaped workpiece, which was subsequently finished with a one-way AFM process. The present study focuses on the analysis of newly developed AFM media using rheological tests, Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) spectroscopic method, thermogravimetric analysis (TGA), and finishing experiments on FDM printed hemispherical ball-shaped workpieces to assess the effectiveness of newly developed media in comparison to traditional media. For FDM printed hemispherical ball-shaped workpieces, the largest percentage improvement in average surface roughness (Ra) achievable by coal-ash-based medium (50% coal-ash) is 83%. The initial surface roughness was improved by 83.67%, from 9.80 to 01.60 µm.