Ns-pulsewidth pulsed power supply by regulating electrical parameters for AFM nano EDM of nm-removal-resolution

Abstract

Nano electro discharge machining (nano EDM), as a frontier processing method in the research stage of exploration, has an important application prospect in the machining of metal and alloy materials for achieving nanoscale removal resolution. A pulsed power supply used in nano EDM is expected to limit a single pulse energy to nJ order of magnitude for improving the removal resolution of single pulsed discharge even to nanoscale. One developing direction is to decrease pulsewidth of the pulsed power supply. Conventional pulsed power supplies hardly output a single pulse and continuous pulses with nanosecond (ns) pulsewidth, resulting in too large single pulsed energy of μJ order of magnitude usually. In this research, a novel pulsed power supply is designed for realizing the ns-pulsewidth with controllable pulsewidth and peak voltage. The key novelty lies in a cascaded circuit with two triodes working in the state of ultra-fast avalanche conduction, where pF capacitors are applied to adjust the pulsewidth and pulsed energy precisely. Performance tests verified that a single pulse of 5 ns pulsewidth or continuous pulses up to 9 MHz can be outputted. Furthermore, nano EDM experiments of single pulsed discharge are carried out under the conditions of nanometer (nm) discharge gap and nm-tip tool electrode based on an atomic force microscope (AFM) system. The special results are achieved: a single pulsed energy can reach down to 1.75 nJ by outputting a pulsewidth of 10 ns, and a nano-EDM crater is only about 182 nm in diameter with regular shape and little recasting. Those results verify the possibility of AFM-tip-based nano EDM for machining nanostructures.