In many engineering applications, components require high surface finish. Achieving micro/nano-level surface finish with conventional finishing process becomes challenging due to the use of new alloy and superalloy workpiece materials and complex pro-files of workpiece. Magnetic abrasive finishing (MAF) is a promising approach to provide better surface finish for not only for softer but also for harder materials. In this paper, development details of MAF setup for plane workpiece are presented. The developed setup was attached to a trainer CNC milling machine. With the developed setup, the effect of selected input process parameters, namely, rotational speed of electromagnet, abrasive mesh number, and working gap, was studied on percentage improvement in the surface finish (PISF) for mild steel workpiece. In the parametric study, L9 orthogonal array was used for designing the experiments to study the effect on PISF. With Taguchi and ANOVA (analysis of variance), it was identified that the abrasive particle size has more influence on PISF (42.32%), followed by working gap and rotational speed. A linear regression model was developed for the selected input and process parameters of MAF. The percentage error of the predicted PISF and experimental PISF on the optimum input parameter was 8.04%.

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