A novel polishing method for single-crystal silicon using the cavitation rotary abrasive flow

Abstract

Traditional low-pressure abrasive flow polishing can produce highly smooth surfaces, but the efficiency of this method is too low for polishing of hard-brittle materials parts. This paper proposes a novel cavitation rotary abrasive flow polishing (CRAFP) method. The energy generated from the cavitation bubble collapse is used to increase the kinetic energy of the abrasive particles in the low-pressure abrasive flow and the motion randomness of the abrasive particles near the wall; thereby, the efficiency and quality of low-pressure abrasive flow polishing are improved. The CRAFP mechanism was first introduced, and then the characteristics of the CRAFP process were investigated using computational fluid dynamics (CFD)-based abrasive flow simulation. Subsequently, a single-crystal silicon wafer polishing test was carried outperformed to verify the validity of the CRAFP method. The polishing results were compared with those of the traditional low-pressure abrasive flow polishing method. After 8 h of polishing using the CRAFP method and the traditional low-pressure abrasive flow polishing method, the surface roughness of the workpiece decreased to7.87 nm and 10.53 nm, respectively. Furthermore, by starting at similar initial roughness values, the polishing time required to reduce the roughness to 12 nm was 3.5 h and 6 h, respectively. The experimental results demonstrated that CRAFP can satisfy the surface requirements of single-crystal silicon (Ra < 12 nm) and exhibit high polishing efficiency and good quality.