Vibration-assisted dry polishing of fused silica using a fixed-abrasive polisher

• Vibration polishing increases material removal while maintains surface quality.
• A mathematical model is built to elucidate the increased material removal.
• A surface morphology simulation models surface pattern in vibration polishing.
• A mechanism for fixed-abrasive dry polishing of fused glass is put forward.

Glass is a ubiquitous but essential material in everyday life and industry. The most common method for polishing glass involves the use of free abrasives. However, this method is basically non-deterministic and lacks efficiency. Therefore, vibration has been employed to aid fixed-abrasive polishing in our research. It is found that the vibration can increase the material removal rate while maintain surface quality in fixed abrasive polishing. Normalized Preston coefficients that are the index of the polishing capability of a certain polishing process considerably increase in vibration-assisted polishing process. A mathematic model is set up to interpret the increase in material removal rate for vibration process. The modeled results show that the vibration can improve material removal by increasing vibration amplitude in vertical direction while the horizontal vibration contributes little to increasing material removal rate, which agrees well with experimental results. Aside from material removal, surface morphology of polished glass was also modeled for both vibration and conventional processes. Both experimented and simulated morphology evidence that the vibration some periodic structure on polished surface. The possible mechanism in dry fixed abrasive polishing was also chemically analyzed and a probable mechanism is put forward to clarify the material removal in dry fixed abrasive polishing.