Simulation Study on Microstructure of Magnetic Field Assisted ECAM

Abstract

Electrochemical additive manufacturing (ECAM) technology is a non-thermal metal additive manufacturing technology that is widely used in microfabrication. The quality of additively manufactured moulded parts can be improved by applying magnetic fields with unknown effects of process parameters on additively manufactured microstructures. Therefore, a multi-physical field coupling model for magnetic field-assisted ECAM was developed. The results show that increasing the applied voltage and magnetic field strength can increase the cathode current density and improve the deposition rate and deposition height, but after the applied voltage increases to 4 V, the ion concentration decreases too fast and the concentration polarization occurs, which affects the deposition rate instead. The ion flux reached the maximum at the magnetic field strength of 0.2T. However, the cathode current density is affected by the electrode gap, and the deposition rate decreases with the increase of the electrode gap, and the deposition rate stabilizes after the electrode gap increases to 50 μm. The increase in current density with increasing electrode size may be related to the applied magnetic field.