Kinetic finishing applying a low pressure abrasive slurry jet system

In this paper, a new finishing process, Fluid Jet Polishing (FJP), is presented that is capable of locally shaping and polishing complicated optical surfaces in brittle materials (e.g. glass). Within FJP, a fluid jet system is used to guide a premixed slurry at pressures below 6 bar to the surface. An experiment is described in which a slurry comprising water and 10% #800 SiC abrasives (21.8pm) is used to reduce the surface roughness of a BK7 sample from 350 nm rms to 25 nm rms and to vary the shape of a polished BK7 sample maintaining its surface roughness of 1.6 nm rms.