Thermal modelling for conformal polishing in inductively coupled atmospheric pressure plasma processing.

Inductively coupled atmospheric pressure plasma processing (IC-APPP) is a novel polishing technique for silica-based optics to quickly mitigate the surface or subsurface damage due to its high efficiency and low cost. However, theoretically uniform removal of materials is difficult to achieve because of complex thermal effect. In this paper, numerical modelling and experimental study of global temperature field in IC-APPP is presented. First, a transient heat transfer model is established using finite element analysis to study the characteristics of temperature field distribution during the process. Then, the effects of substrate geometry and processing parameters are systematically analyzed. Finally, conformal polishing experiments are carried out to illustrate the correlation between the effectiveness of uniform removal and the temperature field. The surface shape can be maintained well with optimal processing parameters in IC-APPP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]