Precision grinding of BK7 glasses using conditioned coarse-grained diamond wheel

For precision machining of large-sized optical elements, more attention is being paid to the ground surface quality, the processing costs and the machining efficiency. Besides the commonly used fine-grained diamond wheels, the coarse-grained diamond wheel is now also expected to be a promising tool with lower wheel wear rate and higher efficiency. However, conditioning of this kind of wheel is always a difficult issue to deal with. In this article, the efficient conditioning of the electroplated diamond wheel and precision grinding of BK7 glasses were investigated. Through the single diamond grit wear simulation, D3 steel was chosen as the conditioning tool. The worn diamond abrasive morphology and Raman spectroscopy analysis revealed the conditioning mechanism. Under different conditioning stages, the BK7 glasses were correspondingly ground exhibiting different surface integrity and grinding forces. The experimental results indicated that the wheel's run-out error could be rapidly reduced to 5.8 mu m because of the blend graphitization, passivation, diffusion and microcrushing of the diamond abrasives. The precision ground BK7 glasses could achieve a surface roughness of Ra < 20nm and a subsurface crack depth around 2 mu m, illustrating that the electroplated coarse-grained diamond wheel could be an alternative for precision grinding large-sized optical elements in terms of high accuracy, cost-effectiveness and high efficiency.