Finishing of micro-aspheric tungsten carbide mold using small viscoelastic tool

Tungsten carbide is widely used as the material of replication mold to produce small aspheric optics, and the polishing process determines the precision of these molds. However, for micro-aspheric tungsten carbide mold, the existing polishing methods are difficult to realize the form error modification during a polishing process due to the polishing tool is always larger than small mold. Therefore, a polishing tool using polyester fiber cloth to wrap small-size rigid ball is used in this paper. In order to predict the tool influence function (TIF) of this polishing tool, a series of theoretical analysis and experimental verification are carried out in this paper. Firstly, by analyzing the structural and viscoelastic characteristics of the fiber cloth, the pressure distribution in the polishing contact area is determined. And the polishing speed distribution is obtained by analyzing the kinematic movement of polishing tool; Then, combined with Preston equation, the TIF is derived; Afterward, through a series of single point polishing experiments, it is verified that the volume error between the theoretical removal model and the experimental removal is less than 6.9% when the polishing pressure is low; Finally, the TIF is applied to the form error corrective polishing of small size symmetric aspheric tungsten carbide mold. After a form error corrective polishing test, the PV value (peak to valley) of form error is decreased from 0.268 to 0.083 μm, which verifies the effectiveness of this polishing method for small size tungsten carbide mold in form error correction.