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How to choose your polishing materials?
Polishing is the action of remove surface for the shortest time, while ensuring a high level of surface finish, fitting the application.
The polished substrate is the material on the surface of the device to be polished. Each substrate has its own intrinsic hardness, often measured on the Mohs scale (0 to 10).
The polishing process always implies a compromise between polishing speed (Removal Rate – RR) and surface finish. This will depend on the nature of the substrate to polish and especially its intrinsic hardness, and the polishing technique used.
Polished Substrates
We can provide various products design adapted to the polishing process of our customer: powder, slurry, paste, formulation. In the powders, we control the agglomerates to offer the best efficiency (integration of spray-dried products, fine alpha particles blended with gamma, agglomerates of alpha particles, isolated alpha particles…).
Especially for alumina, we can play on the size of the particles and the particle size distribution in order to fit the most closely with the required surface finish. See our blog post about the Superior Finishing Polishing erformance with Fine Alumina with high specific area vs. Colloidal Silica for soft metals in Metallography for instance. You will discover how fine alumina with high specific area contributes to a better surface finish quality, a reduction in polishing time and ease of cleaning.
We can also intervene on the alpha alumina rate into a gamma alumina matrix. In the case of formulations, we can play on other important parameters for polishing, such as viscosity, complementary to the abrasive efficiency.
For various substrates, we will play on abrasive properties of particles, choosing the nature of the abrasive (Zirconia, Ceria, Spinel…). Baikowski delivers products to polish substrates such as:
- Ceramic. We can polish various ceramic substrates such as spinel pieces.
Crystal. For example, the sapphire: we can adapt the products according to the crystallographic face to polish. This substrate can be found in watchmaking (watch tops before and after polishing in the opposite illustration) and semiconductor industries.- Glass. High performance glass parts can be polished with ceria-based slurries.
- Metal. Fine pieces for watchmaking, low thickness, requiring highly fine surface finish.
- Organic Glass. This category includes intraocular lenses (picture below), which can be polished by an alumina-based formulation.
- Varnish & lacquer. Car polish is a well-known application, which requires pastes-type formulations, or at least high-viscosity products.
Crystal. For example, the sapphire: we can adapt the products according to the crystallographic face to polish. This substrate can be found in 
Processability of Baikowski® powders
We design our polishing materials to make them implementable in various media (pastes, slurries), and we can optimize the design of our abrasives to adapt to the application requirements (viscosity, pH control…). We also provide ready to use slurries.