Assessment of sustainable and machinable performance metrics of monocrystalline silicon carbide wafer with electrophoretic-assisted multi-diamond wire sawing

The rapacious demand for energy in semiconductor wafer manufacturing industries has significant implications for global warming and wafer manufacturing costs. Assessing sustainability in the multi-diamond wire sawing (MDWS) process is crucial for reducing costs and mitigating environmental impacts. However, sustainable assessment integrated with machinable performance metrics in this process has not been investigated. This novel study extensively analyzes sustainability metrics such as processing time, energy consumption, carbon dioxide emissions, machining cost, and machinability characteristics, including surface roughness, diamond wear rate, and sawing temperature in monocrystalline silicon carbide (mono-SiC) sawing process. Experiments were conducted using traditional MDWS (T-MDWS), reactive MDWS (R-MDWS), and electrophoretic-assisted reactive MDWS (ER-MDWS) coolants. An autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model was used to predict the overall energy consumption of the MDWS machine. Results showed significant improvements across various responses such as processing time, energy consumption, carbon dioxide emissions, machining cost, surface roughness, diamond wear rate, and sawing temperature, with reductions of 2.95%, 3.87%, 6.80%, 12.82%, 4.68%, 16.32%, and 4.39%, respectively. Furthermore, the ARIMA model results indicate that the total energy consumption prediction accuracy reaches 98.813%. The findings demonstrated that the ER-MDWS cooling strategy is well-suited for large-scale wafer production without compromising surface quality while minimizing environmental impact.