Ultrasonic vibration-assisted grinding of quartz glass micro-hole

Quartz glass is extensively utilized in the aviation and biomedical fields. However, achieving high-quality ultrafine micro-holes on quartz glass is difficult because edge chipping and internal surface defects are prone to occur during processing. Therefore, the ultrasonic vibration-assisted grinding (UVAG) was proposed to realize efficient and low-damage precision machining of quartz glass micro-holes. First, the brittle-to-plastic transition depth and theoretical motion trajectory of a single grit of quartz glass in UVAG were analyzed. Subsequently, comparative experiments were conducted between UVAG and conventional grinding (CG) to machine quartz glass micro-holes. Finally, the influences of different parameters on grinding force, edge chipping, entrance and exit diameters, and internal surface quality were investigated. The experiments demonstrated that the grinding force, edge chipping at the entrance and exit, and internal surface roughness can be effectively reduced by UVAG compared to CG. After UVAG, the axial grinding force, size of the edge chips at the entrance and exit, and internal surface roughness decreased by 40.97 %, 36.28 %, 42.09 %, and 12.59 %, respectively. After optimizing the process parameters of UVAG, the size of edge chipping at the entrance and exit were 6.5 mu m and 7 mu m, respectively, and the internal surface roughness reached 0.146 mu m. In this case, the diameter of the micro-hole was 112 mu m, and had a depth-to-diameter ratio greater than 10.