A Study of Variation in MRR Influenced by Work Piece Positioning on Copper and Stainless Steel During Wet Chemical Machining

Abstract

Wet Chemical Machining is one of the nonconventional machining processes, which is based on the principle of control corrosion phenomenon referred as redox reaction. Moreover, the need to manufacture the micro featured components is increasing continuously because of process capabilities and advancement in the manufacturing techniques. The paper deals with the study of material removal behavior and comparative study on copper and stainless steel sheet having thickness of 100 μ-m with influence of work piece positioning. FeCl3 is the chemical etchant used in process and dry photoresist film for both side coating. For the comparative study two different geometrical configurations of regular hexagons with sides 3 mm and 5 mm were selected. The experiments were performed with the optimized results of input parameters like concentration of 600 gm/lit and temperature of 54°C. It is seen that material removal rate is non-uniform from each hexagon and varies from the top to bottom of sheet. This non-uniformity encountered is due to positioning of work piece while etching. As material removal is non-uniform, the intermediate measurements of thickness variation and irregular area variation is done with plunger dial gauge and USB optical camera respectively with least count of 1 μ-m. Thus, from the variation in thickness and area in each of the hexagon the volume of material removed is calculated and influence of positioning the work piece is analysed. It is observed that the stainless steel sheets require three times more time compared to copper for etching same sheet thickness.