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The 304 austenitic stainless steel is used in a wide range of important industries such as industrial, food, medical, and furniture decoration, seeming the most widely used chromium-nickel stainless steel, but which machinability proves very poor, being a typical difficult cutting material. The tool wear phenomenon is very serious in the process of cutting and is not easy to acquire the splendid machining quality. For this reason, the ultrasonic vibration is introduced into turning to realize ultrasonic vibration-assisted turning (UAT) to solve the above problems in this study. This paper first proves that the ultrasonic vibration has a certain inhibitory effect on the tool wear by theoretical and simulation methods. Then, the influence of technological parameters on the tool wear is studied by experiments. The results show that there is an optimal range of the ultrasonic amplitude and the cutting speed for the UAT, and which has a significant inhibitory effect on the tool wear when the technological parameters are selected properly. The tool wear of conventional turning (CT) is more serious under the same technological parameters. In addition to the abrasive wear and the adhesive wear, the deformation and the collapse also occur, accompanied by obvious sticking substances, which reduce the service life of the cutting tool greatly and has a certain impact on the machining efficiency and the cost. Furthermore, the UAT can also achieve better-machined surface quality under the condition of technological parameters with the less tool wear. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When processing difficult-to-cut materials, conventional turning (CT) typically suffers from the problems of large cutting force, difficult chip removal, and serious tool wear, resulting in deteriorated processing quality, reduced processing efficiency, and increased processing costs. In addition, special-purpose machine tools used for ultrasonic machining exhibit disadvantages, such as narrow application scope, high manufacturing cost, and poor universality; thus, they are not conducive to being popular in actual production and processing. Accordingly, this study analyzed the characteristics of ultrasonic wave, the mechanism of ultrasonic vibration-assisted turning (UAT), and the formation of a machined surface in UAT. Moreover, the machining system of UAT was established. This system applied an ultrasonic wave vibration device to an engine lathe to meet the requirements of vibration cutting in actual production. Simultaneously, Inconel 718, a typical and widely used difficult-to-cut material, was selected for the experimental study. The machining effect of UAT was analyzed in detail, including surface roughness, surface topography, and chip shape. Results indicated that ultrasonic amplitude, cutting speed, depth of cut, and feed rate exert considerable influences on the machining effect. UAT can achieve this effect, which is difficult to realize via CT, under the condition of a reasonable selection of technological parameters. This research can provide theoretical support and experimental basis for the development and practical application of UAT. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research study focuses on the experimental analysis of the three-dimensional (3D) surface topography and surface roughness of the workpiece machined with ultrasonic vibration assisted turning (UAT) in comparison to conventional turning (CT). For the challenge that machining difficulties of 304 austenitic stainless steel (ASS 304) and high demands for the machined surface quality and machining precision represent, starting with cutting principle and processing technology, the ultrasonic vibration method is employed to scheme out a machining system of ultrasonic vibration assisted turning (MS-UAT). The experiments for turning the workpiece of ASS 304 are conducted with and without ultrasonic vibration using the designed MS-UAT, and then the 3D morphology evaluation parameters Sa and Sq are applied to characterize and analyse the machined surface. The experimental results obtained demonstrate that the process parameters in UAT of ASS 304 have obvious effect on the 3D surface topography and surface roughness of machined workpiece, and the appropriate choice of various process parameters, including ultrasonic amplitude, feed rate, depth of cut, and cutting speed, can enhance the machined surface quality efficiently to make the machining effect of UAT much better than that of CT. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Broad-area lasers (BALs) have found applications in a variety of crucial fields on account of their high output power and high energy transfer efficiency. However, they suffer from poor spatial beam quality due to multi-mode behavior along the waveguide transverse direction. In this paper, we propose a novel metasurface waveguide structure acting as a transverse mode selective back-reflector for BALs. In order to effectively inverse design such a structure, a digital adjoint algorithm is introduced to adapt the considerably large design area and the high degree of freedom. As a proof of the concept, a device structure with a design area of 40 × 20 μm2 is investigated. The simulation results exhibit high fundamental mode reflection (above 90%), while higher-order transverse mode reflections are suppressed below 0.2%. This is, to our knowledge, the largest device structure designed based on the inverse method. We exploited such a device and the method and further investigated the device's robustness and feasibility of the inverse method. The results are elaborately discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On-chip optical modulators, which are capable of converting electrical signals into optical signals, constitute the foundational components of photonic devices. Photonics modulators exhibiting high modulation efficiency and low insertion loss are highly sought after in numerous critical applications, such as optical phase steering, optical coherent imaging, and optical computing. This paper introduces a novel accumulation-type vertical modulator structure based on a silicon photonics platform. By incorporating a high-K dielectric layer of ZrO2, we have observed an increase in modulation efficiency while maintaining relatively low levels of modulation loss. Through meticulous study and optimization, the simulation results of the final device structure demonstrate a modulation efficiency of 0.16 V·cm, with a mere efficiency–loss product of 8.24 dB·V. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]