Micro/nano Indentation and Single Grit Diamond Grinding Mechanism on Ultra Pure Fused Silica

The existing research about ductile grinding of fused silica glass was mainly focused on how to carry out ductile regime material removal for generating very ＂smoothed＂ surface and investigate the machining-induced damage in the grinding in order to reduce or eliminate the subsurface damage.The brittle/ductile transition behavior of optical glass materials and the wear of diamond wheel are the most important factors for ductile grinding of optical glass.In this paper,the critical brittle/ductile depth,the influence factors on brittle/ductile transition behavior,the wear of diamond grits in diamond grinding of ultra pure fused silica（UPFS） are investigated by means of micro/nano indentation technique,as well as single grit diamond grinding on an ultra-stiff machine tool,Tetraform ＂C＂.The single grit grinding processes are in-process monitored using acoustic emission（AE） and force dynamometer simultaneously.The wear of diamond grits,morphology and subsurface integrity of the machined groves are examined with atomic force microscope（AFM） and scanning electron microscope（SEM）.The critical brittle/ductile depth of more than 0.5 μm is achieved.When compared to the using roof-like grits,by using pyramidal diamonds leads to higher critical depths of scratch with identical grinding parameters.However,the influence of grit shapes on the critical depth is not significant as supposed.The grinding force increased linearly with depth of cut in the ductile removal regime,but in brittle removal regime,there are large fluctuations instead of forces increase.The SEM photographs of the cross-section profile show that the median cracks dominate the crack patterns beneath the single grooves.Furthermore,The SEM photographs show multi worn patterns of diamond grits,indicating an inhomogeneous wear mechanism of diamond grits in grinding of fused silica with diamond grinding wheels.The proposed research provides the basal technical theory for improving the ultra-precision grinding of UPFS.

Deformation Analysis of Micro/Nano Indentation and Diamond Grinding on Optical Glasses

The previous research of precision grinding optical glasses with electrolytic in process dressing （ELID） technology mainly concentrated on the action of ELID and machining parameters when grinding, which aim at generating very ＂smoothed＂ surfaces and reducing the subsurface damage. However, when grinding spectrosil 2000 and BK7 glass assisted with ELID technology, a deeply comparative study on material removal mechanism and the wheel wear behaviors have not been given yet. In this paper, the micro/nano indentation technique is initially applied for investigating the mechanical properties of optical glasses, whose results are then refereed to evaluate the machinability. In single grit diamond scratching on glasses, the scratching traces display four kinds of scratch characteristics according to different material removal modes. In normal grinding experiments, the result shows BK7 glass has a better machinability than that of spectrosil 2000, corresponding to what the micro/nano indentation vent revealed. Under the same grinding depth parameters, the smaller amplitude of acoustic emission （AE） raw signals, grinding force and grinding force ratio correspond to a better surface quality. While for these two kinds of glasses, with the increasing of grinding depth, the variation trends of the surface roughness, the force ratio, and the AE raw signals are contrary, which should be attributed to different material removal modes. Moreover, the SEM micrographs of used wheels surface indicate that diamond grains on the wheel surface after grinding BK7 glass are worn more severely than that of spectrosil 2000. The proposed research analyzes what happened in the grinding process with different material removal patterns, which can provide a basis for producing high-quality optical glasses and comprehensively evaluate the surface and subsurface integrity of optical glasses.