A wear mechanism map for the diamond polishing process

Investigating the mechanisms of diamond polishing using Raman spectroscopy

“…As mentioned earlier, chemical, mechanical, and thermal wear have all been argued to play a part in the removal process. It is, however, becoming clear that a number of competing processes may act, and that these are a function of the velocity of the sliding [3,4]. It is also clear that polishing on the scaife differs from low-speed frictional sliding due to the vastly different contact conditions, the materials involved and the velocity of sliding; comparisons should thus be made with caution.…”

“…Thermal wear has previously been dismissed due to reports [22] that material removal was linearly proportional to the abrading (NB: not polishing) velocity. These experiments were not carried out under industrial polishing conditions, rather on miniature grinding wheels and more recent research [3,4,17] challenges their view. van Bouwelen et al [27] suggest that a structural change due to the large shear stresses present at the diamond-scaife interface is responsible for the non-diamond carbon wear debris.…”

“…Preparation is carried out in the workshop in which they are to be used. Inevitably, experimental results on this subject are conflicting (see [3] for a thorough review), though several recent papers have addressed these issues using a different approach [3,4]. Diamonds are also expensive and as a consequence reported research has been hampered by the lack of suitable specimens with regular geometry, in the necessary quantities to render the work statistically valid.…”

Crucial fabrication with rounded diamond cutting tools

“…Up to now, regarding the mechanical lapping of single crystal diamonds, many material removal mechanisms were proposed including micro-cleavage along the (111) plane [1,2], thermal wear [3], electrical wear [2,4], fracture lapped in 'hard' direction [5,6], nanometric grooves lapped in 'soft' direction [7,8] and transformation of diamond to graphite [9] or sp3 hybridization structure to sp2 [6,[10][11][12]. But few works above were applied to well reveal the removal mechanism in the 'soft' and 'hard' directions at the same time.…”

Fast removal of surface damage layer from single crystal diamond by using chemical etching in molten KCl + KOH solution

“…These properties make the mechanical polish (MP) or chemical-mechanical polishing (CMP, in which abrasive and corrosive chemical slurry reacts with sample surface to facilitate the mechanical polishing for material removal) of diamond surface a formidable task in terms of removal rate, resultant flatness, possible newly-introduced damages and the economic cost. Although MP is capable of removing the surface layer at a relatively high rate [5,6], CMP removal rate for single-crystal-diamond surface is generally no higher than 100 nm/h [7,8].…”