For the traditional single-side planetary abrasive lapping process particle trajectories passing over the target surface are found to be periodically superposed due to the rational rotation speed ratio of the lapping plate to workpiece that could affect the material removal uniformity and hence its surface quality. This paper reports on a novel driving system design with combination of the tapered roller and contact roller to realize the irrational rotation speed ratio of the lapping plate to workpiece in the single-side planetary abrasive lapping process for the improvement of surface quality. Both of the numerical and experimental investigations have been conducted to evaluate the abrasive lapping performance of the novel driving system. It has been found from the numerical simulation that particle trajectories would theoretically cover the whole target surface if the lapping time is long enough due to their non-periodic characteristics, which can guarantee the uniformity of material removal from the surface of workpiece with relatively high surface quality. The encouraging experimental results underline the potential of the novel driving system design in the application of the single-side planetary abrasive lapping for the improvement of the surface quality in terms of surface roughness and material removal uniformity.

The nanoindentation test is extensively used to obtain the mechanics performance of different kinds of materials. In this study, the general process in the lapping and polishing of Q235 steel samples for nanoindentation has been analyzed by considering the pressure (P), rotation speed of the lapping and polishing plate (r_p), flow rate of abrasive slurry (Q_a), and the processing time (t). It is found from the lapping experiments with a full factorial design that the optimized processing parameters are r_p of 200 r/min, P of 30 N, and t of 4 min considered in this study by considering the material removal rate and subsurface damage. The central composite design method has been used to design the polishing experiments, and the support vector machine (SVM) method has been used to deal with these experimental results, and it is found that the developed SVM model can accurately predict the surface roughness under different processing parameters. Then, based on the SVM model, the genetic algorithm (GA) method is used to obtain the optimized processing parameters in the polishing process, and it is found from the SVM-GA study that the optimized processing parameters in the lapping process are r_p of 108 r/min, P of 33 N, Q_a of 20 ml/min, and t of 3 min. Finally, a set of nanoindentation tests have been conducted to evaluate the lapping and polishing performance, and it is found that the surface integrity has been significantly improved after the optimization of the lapping and polishing parameters by using the SVM-GA method considered in this study.