Investigation into electrorheological fluid-assisted polishing

Electrorheological fluid (ER fluid) is a functional fluid with the property that its viscosity can vary with the applied electric field strength. This paper investigates a polishing method using the electrorheological fluid, known as ER fluid-assisted polishing, for the finishing of micro dies of tungsten carbide alloy, which are used for the mass production of micro aspheric glass lens. The machining principle of the ER fluid-assisted polishing is introduced. By proper design of experiments based on a Taguchi orthogonal array and by multi-variable linear regression, empirical models are developed for evaluation of the effect of the process parameters on the material removal depth and surface roughness obtained in the ER fluid-assisted polishing. Further experiments are conducted to confirm the validity of the developed statistical model by comparing the model predictions with the experimental results and meanwhile the influences of the process parameters on the polishing performance are revealed.