Chemo-mechanical manufacturing of fused silica by combining ultrasonic vibration with fixed-abrasive pellets

Abstract

Vibration-assisted grinding, in which harder abrasives than materials to be machined are employed, has been a viable and effective approach to increasing material removal rate (MRR) and/or reducing surface roughness of ground surfaces. We transfer this ideology to fused silica polishing by incorporating ultrasonic vibration into recently developed fixed-abrasive pellets in an attempt to enhance MRR and/or to improve manufactured surface quality. A prototype ultrasonic vibrator, the heart of the polishing head, was designed and the related experimental work was performed on an in-house built setup in conjunction with the constructed head. The vibrator is devised for the generation of 2-D tool path despite using only one actuator in lieu of two actuators in conventional 2-D ultrasonic machining systems. We then combined the ultrasonic vibration with fixed abrasive polishing pellets to machine fused silica glass. Machining experiments reveal that MRR is considerably increased up to >50% upon the introduction of ultrasonic vibration (UV) whilst surface roughness is not degraded appreciably. It was also noted that a overwhelmingly greater deal of polishing debris was dispelled during ultrasonic vibration assisted polishing than conventional bound-abrasive polishing, which may account for the greater MRR in UV assisted polishing.