Abstract

Electrochemical micromachining (EMM) is proposed as an effective micro machining technology to fabricate complex micro structures on hard-to-cut materials and various recent patents have been discussed in this paper. First, an EMM system that meets the requirements of the EMM process is built. Second, sets of comparative experiments are performed on super alloy plates to study the influence of main electrochemical machining parameters, such as electrical parameters, electrode diameters and electrolyte concentrations on the side gaps. Finally, after the preliminary experiments, some 2D and 3D complex micro structures with physical dimension of several ten micrometers are successfully fabricated on the nickel base superalloy plates, thereby demonstrating that EMM is a very promising micro-fabrication technology.

Keywords: Complex micro shapes, electrochemical etching, electrochemical micromachining system, high precision, micro electrode, nanosecond pulse, superalloy.