Title: Nanometric grinding of axisymmetric aspherical mould inserts for optic/photonic applications

Authors: Han Huang, Tsunemoto Kuriyagawa

Addresses: School of Engineering, The University of Queensland, QLD 4072, Australia. ' Department of Mechatronics and Precision Engineering, Tohoku University, Sendai 980-8579, Japan

Abstract: Nanometric grinding technologies have been developed for fabricating axisymmetric and aspherical mould inserts of cemented tungsten carbide for optical/photonic uses. In this work, a process for truing and dressing ultrafine diamond wheels for nanometric grinding, including the wheel evaluation techniques, was successfully developed. This enabled the achievement of a grain pack density of 87% for the wheels with a mesh size of 3000. A compensation method was proposed to minimise the effect of the initial wheel dimensional and profile errors through the integration of a |dummy| grinding procedure to the grinding process. With the developed grinding protocol, cemented tungsten carbide aspherical mould inserts of 6 and 1 mm in diameters with profile accuracies of ∼0.4 µm in PV value and average surface roughness of below 10 nm were fabricated after only one actual grinding cycle.

Keywords: nanometric grinding; aspherical profiles; mould inserts; tungsten carbide; truing; dressing; compensation; ultraprecision machining; ultrafine diamond wheels; grinding wheels; surface roughness; nanogrinding; nanomanufacturing; optical components; photonic components.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMMM.2007.012668

International Journal of Machining and Machinability of Materials, 2007 Vol.2 No.1, pp.71 - 84

Published online: 06 Mar 2007 *

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