Green silicon carbide powder: the secret weapon to improve polishing efficiency
At two o’clock in the morning, Lao Zhou from the mobile phone back panel workshop threw a glass cover that had just come off the production line on the inspection table, and the sound was as crisp as setting off firecrackers. “Look! It’s the tenth batch! Orange peel and blurry. Apple’s inspector will arrive tomorrow. Can this thing be delivered?!” The bloodshot in his eyes was redder than the indicator light on the machine. Li, who was silent in the corner, slowly pushed a bucket of dark green fine powder over, “Try this ‘green madman’, it is the most exciting to grind hard bones.” Three days later, the first batch of qualified products was airlifted overnight. Lao Zhou patted the bucket of green powder and grinned: “This hot-tempered little guy can really save lives!” In the battlefield of polishing, which is a race against time, green silicon carbide powder (SiC) is an efficient and powerful medicine that specifically treats all kinds of “unable to grind” and “unable to polish”.
Green silicon carbide powder, known as “green carbon” or “GC” in the world. It is not ordinary sand, but a tough guy “refined” in an electric arc furnace of more than 2000 degrees with materials such as quartz sand and petroleum coke. It has a good body: Mohs hardness is as high as 9.2-9.3. It is a bit tougher than its “white corundum cousin” and second only to diamond. What’s more amazing is its “green clothes” – extremely pure silicon carbide crystals, with sharp edges and corners, and a quick and fierce temper. If white corundum is a calm “scraping master”, then green silicon carbide is a “demolition captain” holding a micro mace, specializing in gnawing hard bones, and its efficiency is amazing.
Its value lies in the “fast, accurate, and ruthless” spirit:
1. Gnawing “hard bones”: specializing in all kinds of disobedience
Mobile phone glass (Corning Gorilla), sapphire watch mirror, single crystal silicon wafer, ceramic substrate… These “face projects” of modern industry are harder and more fragile than each other. Ordinary abrasives will either not work or break the edges if too much force is applied. The sharp edges of green silicon carbide powder (like countless micro chisels at the microscopic level), coupled with its own high hardness, allow it to “cut” the surface of hard and brittle materials fiercely and steadily. It can quickly peel the material, instead of “plowing” it like some abrasives to cause deep damage. Polishing the cover of a mobile phone? It can quickly flatten the “mountains” on the glass surface without involving the “valleys” next to it, doubling the efficiency directly, and orange peel texture? No!
2. Cutting “fast knife”: time is money
On the TFT-LCD liquid crystal panel production line, every second of edge grinding and polishing of a large-size glass substrate is related to production capacity. The “speed” of green silicon carbide powder is engraved in its genes. Its particles are not only hard and sharp, but also surprisingly self-sharpening – blunt particles will break themselves under pressure, revealing new sharp edges to continue fighting! Unlike some soft abrasives, they become “smooth” while grinding, and their efficiency plummets. This “self-renewal” ability allows it to be like a fish in water in the rough and medium polishing stages, and its material removal rate per unit time (MRR) is far ahead of its competitors. After a photovoltaic silicon wafer factory switched to green silicon carbide slurry with a specific particle size, the efficiency of silicon wafer edge removal increased by 35%, and the daily production capacity of a single line was squeezed out by hundreds of pieces – in the rush installation season, this is real money!
3. “Fine” in the rough: the delicate balance between efficiency and precision
Don’t think that “green madmen” can only act recklessly. In the precision sapphire window polishing, choosing the right particle size (such as W7, W5 or even finer after fine grading) and formula of green silicon carbide micropowder shows “delicate under roughness”. It can efficiently remove the deep scratches and sub-surface damage layers left by the previous process (such as diamond grinding), laying a good foundation and clearing obstacles for the subsequent real fine polishing (such as using silica sol). This “connecting the previous and the next” role is crucial. Without it to efficiently remove the “hard injuries”, the time-consuming fine polishing step will be greatly extended, and the yield rate will be difficult to guarantee. This is like building a house. Green silicon carbide is the “master worker” who quickly and easily lays the foundation and builds the load-bearing walls. Without it, the “fine work” of pasting gold foil later will be in vain.
4. Playing with “water grinding”: stability is the way to last
Green silicon carbide micropowder has stable chemical properties (inert) and is not easy to react with commonly used water-based or oil-based polishing fluids. What does this mean? The slurry has good stability and is not easy to deteriorate, settle or agglomerate! On the polishing line with a high degree of automation, stable slurry performance is the lifeline. Think about it, if the abrasive is sometimes thick and sometimes thin, and the particles clumping together to block the pipeline, how bad will the yield and equipment maintenance cost be? “Green Carbon” makes people worry-free. The prepared slurry can stably run a shift or even longer, greatly reducing the number of shutdowns to adjust parameters and clean pipelines. Lao Wu, the production supervisor of a precision ceramic bearing factory, said with emotion: “Since the stable green silicon carbide slurry was changed, I can finally sit down and drink hot tea during the night shift inspection. It used to be like putting out a fire!”
In this era of pursuit of smoothness and efficiency, green silicon carbide micropowder has used its “violent temper” hard power to carve its own efficient and reliable name behind countless smooth mirror-like surfaces-it is not a gentle role, but a well-deserved “secret weapon” to improve polishing efficiency.
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