Stainless steels have a variety of engineering applications but are difficult to machine. Drilling is a commonly seenmachining technique for stainless steels. Poor thermal conductivity and severe hardening of stainless steels tend tocause high temperature at drilling region and strong cutting force on cutting tools. As a result, drilling efficiency onstainless steels is usually low and lives of cutting tools are usually short. Therefore, more cost-effective drillingprocesses for stainless steels are desirable. Rotary ultrasonic machining (RUM) is one of the nontraditional drillingprocesses. It has been used to drill holes in ceramics, composites, titanium and its alloys. But it has never been usedfor stainless steels. This paper presents results on surface roughness in an experimental investigation into RUM ofstainless steels. Three-variable two-level full factorial design is used for the experiments. Main effects as well asinteraction effects of three process variables (spindle speed, feedrate, and ultrasonic power) on surface roughness arerevealed. Other results of this investigation will be published in a separate paper.
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