Wire saw

Continuous type saws are used to cut silicon wafers for the semiconductor and photovoltaics industry.

Precision wire saws are used in laboratories to cut fragile crystals, substrates, and other materials.

For example, Bluegrass Companies designed and fabricated a diamond wire sawing method to dismantle the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor for the Princeton plasma physics laboratory.

Mining and quarrying industries commonly use a wire saw to cut hard stone into large blocks that can then be shipped to processing plants to be further refined (in the case of ore dressing) or shipped to distributors (in the case of granite or marble for building).

Quarry saws on this principle date back centuries; before the era of steel cables with diamond cutters, there were fiber ropes that drew sand through the kerf.

The materials to be cut can range from polystyrene, polyethylene, and polyurethane, to high-density or rigid types of foam, such as cellular glass (e.g., Foamglas®).

In the semiconductor industry, multi-wire saws are used to cut cylindrical ingots of silicon boules into thin wafers.

Other disadvantages include a greater chance the wire will break and any surface imperfections can cause errors in the cut.

DWC is also practical and less expensive than some other cutting techniques, for example, thin diamond wire cost around 10-20 cents per foot ($0.7/m) in 2005 for 140 to 500 micrometer diameter wire, to manufacture and sells around $1.25 a foot ($4.10/m) or more, compared to solid diamond impregnated blade cutters costing thousands of dollars.

DWC produces less kerf and wasted materials compared to solid blades (slurry wire may be similar).

Because of the unique nature of DWC, most saws are expensive and are tailor-made to handle diamond wire.

The surface quality in the wire saw process is important for the semiconductor and photo-voltaic industries where the material loss is undesirable.