Chapter Seven - Micromachining processes

Abstract

Removing the surplus material and attaining desired shape, size as well as to create intricate feature is the sole aim of today’s micro manufacturing technologies. Hence, micromachining technologies utilizes various material removal mechanisms to fabricate micro features as well as formed surfaces in micron/sub micron dimensions. In the recent past, the utilization of different micromachining techniques has become popular to fulfill the various needs of micro manufacturing. It includes different micromachining methods which utilize energies, e.g., mechanical, thermal, chemical and electrochemical micromachining. Detail discussion on micro-USM, micro-EDM, micro-LBM, micro-ECM have been highlighted. It contains basic material removal mechanism, setup details, comparison, influence of process parameters, advantages and challenges as well as applications. It also covers different hybrid micromachining processes which combine two or more micromachining processes for achieving advantages of individual processes simultaneously. Latest development in the field of micromachining has also been included considering various sequential micromachining (SMM) processes which is basically a machining strategy where, two or more micromachining techniques are implemented in a sequence on the same machine tools and tries to encompass more and more micromachining processes on a single workstation.