Surface roughness in ultrasonic-assisted and conventional milling of soda-lime glass

Glass has an increasing demand in many industrial fields such as micro-channels and micro reactors in fluidic applications, lab-on-a-chip in medical applications, and micro lens arrays and optical devices. Machining of glass as one of hard-to-machine materials is challengeable due to its distinctive properties of high strength, hardness, and brittleness. Facing these challenges, ultrasonic-assisted milling (UAM); an advanced machining process; was provided for its effectiveness in machining such hard-to-machine materials. In this paper, the effects of feed rate, depth of cut, ultrasonic-vibration assistance, and cutting fluid on surface roughness in UAM of soda-lime glass compared with conventional milling (CM) were investigated. Results showed that, by introducing ultrasonic-vibration, higher surface roughness was obtained. The optimal cutting conditions were attained using response surface methodology. At the optimised parametric setting, the minimum surface roughness was found to be at wet conventional milling.