Selection on Surfactant in Polishing Slurry for Chemical Mechanical Polishing 304 Stainless Steel

Stainless steel will become one of the main substrate materials for flexible large-scale displays. As the substrate of the flexible displays, the biggest problem of stainless steel is that the surface roughness is too large. It is necessary to polish the surface of stainless steel with ultra-precision. Chemical mechanical polishing (CMP) technology will be one of the most practical processing technologies to make the surface of stainless steel ultra-smooth and damage-free. In this paper, the material removal rate (MRR) and surface roughness were studied based on the hydrogen peroxide oxidant and ferric chloride oxidant with different surfactants in chemical mechanical polishing (CMP) slurry by experiments. The results show that it can obtain the maximum of the MRR and the optimal surface quality when using 0.04 wt% sodium hexadecyl sulfate as the surfactant of the hydrogen peroxide-oxalic acid based polishing slurry and when using 0.2 wt% nonylphenol ethoxylate or 0.8 wt% OP-10 emulsifier as the surfactant of the of ferric chloride-oxalic acid based polishing slurry. The results of this study can provide a reference for further research on the chemical mechanical polishing of stainless steel.