Experimental investigation of polishing process for Schott BK-7 optical glass

BK-7 glass has important applications in the field of precision optics, mirrors, lenses, prism, etc. because of its high-quality surface finish, flatness, and transitivity. The achieving of fine surface finish is always a challenge owing to high hardness, chemical resistance, brittle, and non-conducting nature that hinders its processing at the micro-level. The proposed study investigates the polishing process to improve the performance in polishing of BK-7 glass. The experiments were conducted using a full aperture standard polishing machine with a customized polyurethane polishing pad. For experimentation, Taguchi L18 standard orthogonal array (mixed levels) and analysis of variance (ANOVA) methods were deployed for investigating the effect of process parameters i.e. abrasive size (a), normal load (L), and relative velocity (v) for the frictional coefficient (mu) and material removal rate (MRR). The ANOVA results revealed that relative velocity is the most significant parameter for friction coefficient having a 69% contribution. The polishing procedure can be further investigated by considering the different process parameters for the development of empirical models to understand the material removal mechanism. Copyright (C) 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Selection and peer-review under responsibility of the scientific committee of the Third International Conference on Aspects of Materials Science and Engineering.