Morphology characterization of polishing spot and process parameters optimization in magnetorheological finishing

Magnetorheological finishing (MRF) has become the mainstream method for ultra-precision manufacturing of optics due to its high certainty and low damage. However, there are still some gaps in the research on the characteristics of the tool influence function for the MRF method, which makes the parameter optimization and quality improvement lack effective theoretical support. To solve this problem, this paper demonstrates the mapping relationship between various process parameters and the evaluation indexes of the influence function based on the orthogonal test. A characteristic length coefficient is proposed to characterize the suppression effect of the tool influence function on the ripple errors. The uniform removal experiment shows that selecting reasonable characteristic length coefficient and line spacing can significantly suppress the generation of ripple errors and obtain the optimal parameters under a comprehensive consideration. Finally, a component with a size of 400 mm × 280 mm is deterministically finished and a high-quality optical surface is obtained. The theoretical analysis and experiment data carried out in this work can effectively improve the final quality of components and provide certain theoretical support for parameter optimization.