STABILIZATION OF MATERIAL REMOVAL RATE IN SMALL TOOL POLISHING OF GLASS LENSES

抄録

Camera market has been rapidly expanding in industrial use such as broadcasting, on-vehicle, security and medical one, while simultaneously and strongly requiring enhancement of the image quality. To meet the requirement, glass lenses as key devices in cameras must be fabricated with higher degree of form accuracy of surfaces. Surface of glass lenses is formed and finished by polishing using small tools. The existing polishing technologies, however, have serious problems including an unstable material removal rate with the accumulated polishing time. In this study, we conducted glass-polishing experiments to investigate the variation mechanism of the material removal rate. Based on the findings, a new polishing pad was proposed. Our experiments confirmed that the proposed polishing pad was effective in suppressing the variation in the material removal rate.