Laboratory for Manufacturing and Sustainability

The surface and edge quality of single crystal and polycrystalline copper workpieces has been observed to vary significantly as a function of crystallographic orientation. At the precision scale, the chip formation process is influenced by the microstructure of the material, such as grain boundaries and grain orientation in polycrystalline materials, and crystallographic orientation in single-crystal materials. Such variation in the microstructure has a significant effect on the resulting surface, edge, and burr topography.