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Micromachining Education and Research at Texas A&M University

Abstract

The market trend for product miniaturization promotes research and education in micro manufacturing. Micromachining is an extension of conventional machining when chips are removed in micro/nano scales, but micromachining requires new knowledge, specially designed equipment, tooling, and additional knowledge for successful results. Common machining techniques for macro-scale machining often lead to inconclusive data and frustration when applying to micromachining.

This paper presents a synergistic effort that offers research and educational opportunities to students. Equipment and tooling are provided by industry, while resources are provided by university and National Science Foundation to both graduate and undergraduate students. The lab exercises are designed to complement research activities so that a broader impact can be achieved. The study presents the necessary conditions and infrastructure for successful micro machining. It characterizes how micromist would benefit micromachining, and predicts how micro tools would fail during services. It has been experimentally verified that micromist significantly improves tool life of microtools when compared to flood coolant and dry micromachining. Using the analogy of flow of the coolant over a rotating tool, computational fluid mechanics is used to optimize set up conditions that gives maximum lubrication and cooling effects at the cutting edges of a micromilling cutter. The optimal droplet size is calculated assuming it can penetrate the boundary layer of a high-speed rotating tool and reach the tool surface. Failure of microtools includes the adverse effects of spindle run out, tool deflection, and high cutting stress in micro machining. Dynamic response and laser displacement methods are used to characterize the equipment and setup. Finite element techniques are used to study and analyze the effects for different cutting conditions on the failure of microcutting tool. Experimental data on micromachining of 316L stainless steel are presented and confirmed with theoretical calculations.

Introduction

With the maturity and saturation of commercial products, new market trend predict waves of miniature products that packed with even more functional features. It is now appropriate to consider the future needs of production engineering from the perspective of product miniaturization. Micromanufacturing is multidisciplinary with customer needs and economics playing an increasingly important role. The precision and miniature products require diminishing component size, enhancing surface quality, tighter tolerances and manufacturing accuracies, reducing costs and diminishing component weight. Today precision machine tools under computer control can position a tool with sub-micron resolution and accuracy. Micromachining is the key to the manufacture of many advanced micro-electromechanical products for a variety of industrial and medical applications. The continuous demand for increased functionality, reduced size, small complex features on meso-scale components has led to the increase in research for micromanufacturing. The current silicon-based micromachining processes suffer from several inherent problems like high cost of sophisticated equipment, use of toxic chemicals,

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Hung, W., & Chittipolu, S., & Kajaria, S. (2009, June), Micromachining Education And Research At Texas A&M University Paper presented at 2009 Annual Conference & Exposition, Austin, Texas. 10.18260/1-2--5864