Impact of different types of water as lubricants on roughness and contamination of bound abrasive ground heavy flint glass surfaces

Mechanical abrasion is usually accepted to be the predominant mechanism during material removal of glass via grinding. However, a certain chemical reaction of the used lubricant with the glass surface as occurring during polishing can be expected. Against this background, the impact of different types of water as lubricants, tap water and distilled deionised water, on surface roughness and the degree of contamination of bound abrasive ground heavy flint glass surfaces was investigated in this contribution. It is shown that in case of distilled deionised water, notably lower surface roughness is obtained. Moreover, huge differences in the presence of hydrogen and calcium were qualitatively measured via laserinduced breakdown spectroscopy. The results indicate that the type of water, and especially its content of mineral trace elements, has a mentionable impact on the grinding process and the state of the ground surface. Smoother surfaces with a lower amount of contaminations were achieved when using distilled deionised water in the course of the grinding process. This fact is of mentionable interest for the production of optical components where usually, optically inactive surfaces remain in the ground state.