Study of Femtosecond Laser Ablation and Polishing Process on RB-SiC Surface

Femtosecond laser, as a highly promising tool for high precision processing, is expected to solve the problem of low efficiency of the traditional polishing process of RB-SiC caused by its two-phase structure and high hardness. However, few applications of femtosecond laser in RB-SiC have been reported, and its interaction process and ablation pattern with RB-SiC are still unclear. Therefore, this paper elucidated the interaction process between femtosecond laser and RB-SiC surface based on the one-dimensional two-temperature model, and on this basis, the study of femtosecond laser ablation law and polishing process on RB-SiC surface was carried out. The results showed that the effective regulation of ablation depth and surface quality can be achieved by changing the parameters of pulse energy, scanning speed, and scanning spacing. But on the cut surface of RB-SiC, it was difficult to obtain a higher quality surface by femtosecond laser polishing, while for the pre-polished surface of RB-SiC, the surface roughness Sq could be polished from 36.9 nm to 11.56 nm by process parameter tuning, which verifies the feasibility of femtosecond laser polishing of RB-SiC.