抄録
This paper deals with the wear characteristics of grinding wheel on spiral ultrasonic assisted grinding of sapphire wafer. The spiral ultrasonic assisted grinding (SUAG) using vitrified diamond grinding wheel have been carried out and sequential changes of the wheel working surface topography have been observed during grinding process using a scanning electron microscope with four electron probes (3D-SEM). The obtain results show that the wheel wear in SUAG process is reduced compared with conventional grinding (CG) process. Especially, these results are closely related that a maintaining of good wheel surface in SUAG is demonstrated based on quantitative evaluation using number of grain cutting edges.