Abstract
Process parameter conditions such as vibrating motion, abrasives, pressure and tool wear play an important role in vibration-assisted polishing of micro-optic molds as they strongly affect material removal efficiency and stability. This paper presents an analytical and experimental investigation on the effects of process parameters, aimed at clarifying interrelations between material removal and process parameters which affect polishing quantitatively. The material removal rate (MRR) and surface roughness which represent the polishing characteristics were examined under different vibrating motions, grain sizes of abrasives and polishing pressure. The effects of pressure and tool wear conditions on tool influence function were analyzed. The results showed that 2D vibrating motion generated better surface roughness with higher material removal efficiency while a smaller grain size of abrasives created better surface roughness but lower material removal efficiency. MRR gradually decreases with the increase of polishing pressure when it exceeds 345 kPa, and it was greatly affected by the wear of polisher when wear diameter on the polisher’s head exceeds 300 μm.
Highlights
There is an increasing demand for micro-optic lenses with low-cost and high optical qualities in consumer digital optical devices such as digital cameras, DVD players and microscopes
To reveal some insights of the mechanism involved in vibration-assisted polishing, a general model of material removal is proposed to illustrate the phenomenon of material removal rate (MRR) change by varying polishing pressure
Tungsten carbide was adopted as the workpiece material since it is a hard-brittle material which can withstand high temperature and pressure conditions in the hot-press molding process to replicate the glass lenses
Summary
There is an increasing demand for micro-optic lenses with low-cost and high optical qualities in consumer digital optical devices such as digital cameras, DVD players and microscopes. To polish small-size optics, recently, a vibration-assisted polishing method has been proposed and successfully applied to finish the micro-optic molds with high form accuracy and low surface roughness [17,18,19,20]. To reveal some insights of the mechanism involved in vibration-assisted polishing, a general model of material removal is proposed to illustrate the phenomenon of MRR change by varying polishing pressure. As another parameter which greatly affects MRR, the wear of the polisher is discussed with some experimental verification
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