Wheel Wear and Surface/Subsurface Qualities when Precision Grinding Optical Materials

An ultra precision large optics grinder, which will provide a rapid and economic solution for grinding large off-axis aspherical and free-form optical components, has been developed at Cranfield University. This paper presents representative grinding experiments performed on another machine - a 5 axes Edgetek - in order to verify the proposed BoX(r) grinding cycle. The optical materials assessed included; Zerodur(r), SIC and ULE(r), all three being materials are candidates for extreme large telescope (ELT) mirror segments. Investigated removal rates ranged from 2mm3/s to 200mm3/s. The higher removal rate ensures that a 1 metre size optic could be ground in less than 10 hours. These experiments point out the effect of diamond grit size on the surface quality and wheel wear. The power and forces for each material type at differing removal rates are presented, together with subsurface damage.