Study of pulse electrochemical micro machining

The need for complex and accurate micro components is increasing rapidly for many industrial and consumer products. Electrochemical machining process has the potential of generating desired crack-free and stress-free surfaces of micro components. However, it is necessary to modify the existing ECM process for reducing the interelectrode gap (improved accuracy) and higher localized electrochemical dissolution (smaller feature size). This paper reports a newly developed Pulse Electrochemical Micro Machining (ECMM) process for generating complex 2 1/2 -D and possibly 3-D micro components of high accuracy. A mathematical model based on the first principle of the process mechanism has been developed and experimentally verified using a recently designed and built ECMM system. The effect of voltage and feed rate on process performance has been studied. The application of the proposed method has been illustrated by machining complex cavities of 160 mu m and 180 mu m slot width with straight edges.