Investigations on the fabrication of a patterned tool by chemical etching

Abstract

ABSTRACT The present article introduces chemical etching for the fabrication of a patterned tool to manufacture micro-sized products. Further, a feasibility study is conducted to produce intricate features using the fabricated patterned tool. High depth with the desired width of geometric feature is required on the patterned tool for this study. Three etching process parameters, concentration, time, and temperature were varied to understand their effect on geometric features obtained, viz. depth and width. A three-level factorial design with three center points was applied to perform experiments. For chemical etching, ferric chloride is used as an etchant. The width and depth of geometric features were measured with the help of a stereomicroscope. The analysis of variance (ANOVA) showed the effective contribution of process variables to the desired geometric features. The desirability approach is used to obtain a set of optimal parametric settings. The optimum value of width (at concentration = 2 M, Temperature = 55°C and Time = 15 minutes) of the feature was 191.55 μm, while depth of feature obtained was 167.28 μm at optimum parametric conditions. The process shows its capability to produce complex features on the patterned tool, which was used as an EDM tool electrode to show the potential of the process.