Laser-assisted grinding of reaction-bonded SiC

Luo, Xichun and Li, Zhipeng and Chang, Wenlong and Cai, Yukui and Sun, Jining and Ding, Fei and Zhang, Feihu and Liu, Haitao and Sun, Yazhou (2020) Laser-assisted grinding of reaction-bonded SiC. Journal of Micromanufacturing, 3 (2). pp. 93-98. ISSN 2516-5992 (https://doi.org/10.1177/2516598420965342)

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Abstract

The paper presents development of a novel laser-assisted grinding process to reduce surface roughness and subsurface damage in grinding reaction-bonded (RB)-SiC. A thermal control approach is proposed to facilitate the process development, in which a two-temperature model is applied to control the required laser power to thermal softening of RB-SiC prior to grinding operation without melting the workpiece or leaving undesirable microstructural alteration, while Fourier's law is adopted to obtain the thermal gradient for verification. An experimental comparison of conventional grinding and laser-assisted grinding shows significant reduction of machined surface roughness (37%-40%) and depth of subsurface damage (SSD) layer (22%-50.6%) using the thermal control approach under the same grinding conditions. It also shows high specific grinding energy 1.5 times that in conventional grinding at the same depth of cut which accounts for the reduction of subsurface damage as it provides enough energy to promote ductile-regime material removal.