Diamond wire sawing has been developed to reduce the cutting loss when cutting silicon wafers from ingots. The surface of silicon solar cells must be flawless in order to achieve the highest possible efficiency. However, the
surface is damaged during sawing. The extent of the damage depends primarily on the material removal mode. Under
certain conditions the generally brittle material can be machined in ductile mode, whereby considerably fewer cracks
occur in the surface than with brittle material removal. In the presented paper a numerical model is developed in order
to support the optimization of the machining process regarding the transition between ductile and brittle material
removal. The simulations are performed with an GPUaccelerated in–house developed code using mesh-free methods
which easily handle large deformations while classic methods like FEM would require intensive remeshing. The
simulation results are compared with results obtained from single grain scratch experiments.