Magneto-rheological nano-finishing of polycarbonate

In recent days, optical industries are in a great demand of super polished polycarbonate for making optical lenses because of its light weight, optical clarity and higher toughness over glass. Most of the currently available plastic polishing methods are not suitable for polishing of polycarbonate. In this research work, ball end magneto-rheological finishing (BEMRF) process is used to polish the polycarbonate up to nanometre order level surface roughness with cerium oxide, alumina and diamond as the abrasives. Best polishing results are achieved with diamond abrasive (final surface roughness Ra as 30.5 nm and percentage improvement in surface roughness as 54%). The polishing results of alumina and diamond are almost same. For alumina, analysis of variance (ANOVA) is done to see the factors' effect and their percentage contributions.