The Polishing Technology for Glass Substrates Using Tribo-Chemical Reaction and Electrical Slurry Control

The outstanding advantage of the novel polishing technology developed by the authors has the ability to reduce the cerium oxide abrasives consumption for polishing of glass substrate. This has been realized by introducing tribo-chemical polishing method along with controlled abrasives technique using an AC electric field. In this paper, we attempted to analyze the characteristics of the new polishing technique from the viewpoint of slurry distribution in the polishing area under various electric fields using a digital image processing and evaluated the polishing performance. We confirmed the increase of slurry distribution in the polishing area under the AC electric field due to attractive force generated on polar water molecules which suppressed the scattering of the slurry. Consequently, the removal rate was enhanced. Furthermore, the removal rate of electrical tribo-chemical polishing technology was 2.5 times higher than the conventional CMP (Chemical Mechanical Polishing) method, while the surface roughness was comparable.