Study on the Machinability of Glass Soda-Lime in Diamond Cutting Process

Glass possesses poor machinability in diamond cutting due to its high hardness and high brittleness. In order to investigate the effect of cutting fluids on the machinability of glass, this paper first conducted soda-lime indentation experiment, and then examined the resulting indentation by optical microscope. Based on this, turning tests were carried out to evaluate the influence of the cutting fluid properties on the machinability of glass. Boric acid solutions were selected as cutting fluids in the tests. The surface processing quality of soda-lime was assessed based on the observations of the micro- morphology of the turned surfaces utilizing AFM. Experimental results indicated that compared with the process without cutting fluid action, the machinability of glass soda-lime can be improved by using boric acid solution as the cutting fluid.