Process investigation of Aluminum Nitride ceramics based on compliant finishing tools

Aluminum Nitride (AlN), as a type of advanced functional ceramic material, has found wide applications in many fields, owing to its advantageous properties such as excellent thermal conductivity, high hardness and strength, etc. Nevertheless, these beneficial features bring great challenges to its machinability using current existing methods that commonly result in unsatisfactory surface qualities. In this paper, we investigated the processing performance of AlN by introducing the compliant bonnet finishing approach based on different tool bonding materials and abrasive sizes. The distinctive finishing qualities, material removal rates, tool wear behavior, etc., were studied and compared under various process conditions. Different from other ceramics, the resin bonded diamond tools with the abrasive size of 3 µm is found to be severely worn on AlN ceramic, and compliant tool with the smallest abrasive size of 1 µm greatly contributes to the generation of the near optical quality surface. The comparison with traditional rigid pellet finishing further demonstrates the advantageous finishing performances by using compliant tools on the AlN ceramics.