Unlike LPB, traditional burnishing tools consist of a hard wheel or fixed lubricated ball pressed into the surface of an asymmetrical work piece with sufficient force to deform the surface layers, usually in a lathe.  The process does multiple passes over the work pieces, usually under increasing load, to improve surface finish and deliberately cold work the surface.  Roller and ball burnishing have been studied in Russia and Japan, and were applied most extensively in the USSR in the 1970s.  Various burnishing methods are used, particularly in Eastern Europe, to improve fatigue life.  Improvements in HCF, corrosion fatigue and SCC are documented, with fatigue strength enhancement attributed to improved finish, the development of a compressive surface layer, and the increased yield strength of the cold worked surface.
LPB was developed and patented by Lambda Technologies in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1996.  Since then, LPB has been developed to produce compression in a wide array of materials to mitigate surface damage, including fretting, corrosion pitting, stress corrosion cracking (SCC), and foreign object damage (FOD), and is being employed to aid in daily MRO operations.  To this day, LPB is the only metal improvement method applied under continuous closed-loop process control and has been successfully applied to turbine engines, piston engines, propellers, aging aircraft structures, landing gear, nuclear waste material containers, biomedical implants, armaments, fitness equipment and welded joints.  The applications involved titanium, iron, nickel and steel-based components and showed improved damage tolerance as well as high and low cycle fatigue performance by an order of magnitude.