Mechanical and Laser Micro Deep Drawing

Abstract

Mechanical micro deep drawing becomes a more and more industrial relevant process. But due to size effects new challenges are involved in this process compared to macro deep drawing. The size effects cause an increase of friction and thus hinder the material flow. The change of friction in mechanical micro deep drawing is subject of the presented investigations in this paper. Additionally to this, a new non-mechanical micro deep drawing process is presented, whereby a laser beam acts as a punch. This new laser deep drawing process is based on a totally different mechanism compared to thermal laser forming, e.g. forming by laser induced thermal stresses: The laser produces a pulse with an extremely high power density, which causes plasma generation at the target and thus a shock wave. The shock wave can be used as in explosive forming, but is smaller and easier to generate. Recent investigations showed that using this technology laser deep drawing is possible with a sheet metal out of Al 99.5 and a thickness of 50 'm. The deep drawing process was carried out with a die diameter of 4 mm and shows promising results.