Precision Manufacturing of Fused Silica Glass by Combining Bound-Abrasive Polishing with Ultrasonic Vibration

Ultrasonic vibration assisted machining with harder abrasives than the material to be machined can improve the quality of machined surface and manufacturing efficiency. Therefore, we integrated ultrasonic vibration (UV) into a recently developed technique chemo-mechanical bound-abrasive polishing in anticipation of further increasing the material removal rate (MRR) and/or surface roughness. The preliminary results indicate that ultrasonic vibration assisted chemo-mechanical bound-abrasive polishing can lead to increased material removal rate of manufactured optics while leaving the surface roughness comparable to conventional chemo-mechanical bound-abrasive polishing. The great MRR is attributed to the superiority of UV-assisted chemo-mechanical bound-abrasive polishing in discharging resultant swarf during machining.