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Experimental characterization of conformal hydrodynamic nanopolishing of a machined single crystal sapphire cavity

Sapphire is an important ceramic material which finds applications in fields such as temperature sensing, optics, electronics, and ceramic bearings. Polishing of sapphire has always been a difficult task for industries and research communities. Hydrodynamic polishing (HDP) is one of the prominent methods used for polishing of hard and profiled surfaces, whereas rigid tool-based methods such as diamond turning, grinding, and honing have many limitations. The HDP process involves deterministic flow of abrasive particles in the slurry between the workpiece surface and a rotating soft tool to obtain the desired surface finish. A novel experimental setup has been fabricated to realize the conformal hydrodynamic nanopolishing on single crystal sapphire cavity. In this study, the experiments were conducted to understand the effect of abrasive particle size, basicity of slurry, and change in temperature of slurry on the polishing of machined sapphire cavity. The effect of the initial surface roughness of the machined cavity on conformal hydrodynamic nanopolishing has also been investigated. A microcrack/pit-free surface has been found after the final polishing of the sapphire cavity. An improvement of 21% is found in surface finish after the final polishing using abrasive particle size of 0.06 µm. Abrasive slurry with higher basicity (pH 13) does not improve the surface finish. By heating the abrasive slurry to a temperature of 70°C–75°C, surface finish improves by ∼26% as compared to improvement of ∼ 21% at room temperature polishing.