Simulation of the Ductile Machining Mode of Silicon

Abstract Diamond wire sawing has been developed to reduce the cutting loss when cutting silicon wafers from ingots. The surface of silicon solar cells must be flawless in order to achieve the highest possible efficiency. However, thesurface is damaged during sawing. The extent of the damage depends primarily on the material removal mode. Undercertain conditions the generally brittle material can be machined in ductile mode, whereby considerably fewer cracksoccur in the surface than with brittle material removal. In the presented paper a numerical model is developed in orderto support the optimization of the machining process regarding the transition between ductile and brittle materialremoval. The simulations are performed with an GPUaccelerated in–house developed code using mesh-free methodswhich easily handle large deformations while classic methods like FEM would require intensive remeshing. Thesimulation results are compared with results obtained from single grain scratch experiments.