Abstract
This paper presents a simple fabrication process that allows for isolated metal tracks to be easily defined on the surface of 3D printed micro-scale polymer components. The process makes use of a standard low cost conformal sputter coating system to quickly deposit thin film metal layers on to the surface of 3D printed polymer micro parts. The key novelty lies in the inclusion of inbuilt masking features, on the surface of the polymer parts, to ensure that the conformal metal layer can be effectively broken to create electrically isolated metal features. The presented process is extremely flexible, and it is envisaged that it may be applied to a wide range of sensor and actuator applications. To demonstrate the process a polymer micro-scale gripper with an inbuilt thermal actuator is designed and fabricated. In this work the design methodology for creating the micro-gripper is presented, illustrating how the rapid and flexible manufacturing process allows for fast cycle time design iterations to be performed. In addition the compatibility of this approach with traditional design and analysis techniques such as basic finite element simulation is also demonstrated with simulation results in reasonable agreement with experimental performance data for the micro-gripper.
Highlights
Over the last decade there have been significant advances in the field of additive manufacturing
A commercially available 3D Projection-microstereolithography (PMSL) system manufactured by Envisiontec was used to demonstrate that it is possible to create devices with dimensions and complexity that approach that of traditional MEMS structures
Micro grippers can be used for a wide range of manipulation and assembly tasks, and there are many examples of micro-grippers created using a wide range of manufacturing processes [15,16,17]; for more examples of micro gripper technology, a good review of micro grippers for robotic applications is given by [18]
Summary
Over the last decade there have been significant advances in the field of additive manufacturing. The PMSL process has previously been applied to the manufacture of a number of MEMS devices; for example, in previous work it has been shown that the PMSL process can be used to manufacture complex single material MEMs sensor packaging structures [7] In another interesting example, a polymer micro-gripper based on a hydraulically actuated micro-bellows was created [8]. To create MEMS devices that incorporate metallic electrical tracks, a metal deposition step followed by an additional selective polishing process has been presented [11] The problem with this approach is that post processing requires complicated fixtures to hold the micro part, and high precision processing is required to selectively remove the metal layer without damaging the underlying polymer structure. In addition the ability to use finite element simulation to predict device performance is demonstrated and verified by comparison with experimental test data collected from a fabricated gripper
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