Wire sawing technology: A state-of-the-art review

Wire sawing technology has been widely adopted for slicing of brittle-and-hard materials including crystalline silicon, SIC and sapphire. This paper presents a literature review on the research efforts on wire sawing related topics. First, the system and process level investigations of wire sawing technology, including both multi-wire slurry sawing and diamond wire sawing, are summarized. Ingot materials used in wire sawing technology, as well as their properties and behavior during sawing operation are discussed. As modeling and analysis of single grit indentation and scribing of brittle materials provide fundamental insight on material removal and these can be leveraged for wire sawing analysis at system level, a review of those models and modified models proposed particularly for wire sawing process are also presented. After the survey of current state-of-the-art, this contribution proposes important research aspects to be further worked on to gain more complete scientific understanding of wire sawing technology. (C) 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.