Imposing compliance on grinding and polishing

Compliance is imposed upon the workpiece holder of a polishing/grinding system. Experiment results show that in a polishing process compliance may compensate position and geometry errors of the workpiece, and also compensate errors due to tool wear. During a grinding process it is shown that compliance may absorb high frequency disturbance from the outside, making grinding results unaffected. For a polishing system with compliance, experiment results suggest that soft springs (i.e. springs with greater values of compliance) may compensate workpiece geometry error better. Also, surface roughness decrease with increasing either translational or rotation speed of the polishing ring, and, up to a limit, a smaller pre-load depth gives rise to a smoother surface. A series of experiments based on Taguchi's method for parameter design are performed to determine better combinations of compliance with other polishing parameters, and results show that surface roughness may be greatly reduced.