This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Manufacturing of Ti-6Al-4V Micro-Implantable Parts Using Hybrid Selective Laser Melting and Micro-Electrical Discharge Machining, which has been published in final form at 10.1002/adem.201600172. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving.

In spite of significant improvements in micro-replication techniques, methods to fabricate well-defined net shape microstructures are still in a developing stage. Soft-lithography has the capability to manufacture complex micro-and nanostructures. Although it is considered a robust technique, a major limitation is related to the distortion encountered in the fabricated structures during the drying process. In the present work, a manufacturing technology has been developed that emerges the benefits of Soft-Lithography and Micro Electrical Discharge Machining (µ-EDM) to produce stainless steel precise micro-components for Microimplantable devices. The micro-parts produced by Soft-lithography were subsequently surface processed via µ-EDM in order to improve the surface quality. In addition to this, it was found that µ-EDM drastically improved the surface roughness of stainless steel microcomponents from Ra=3.4 µm to Ra =0.43 µm.

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At the present time, there is a growing interest in additive manufacturing (AM) technologies and their integration into current process chains. In particular, the implementation of AM for tool production in micro injection molding (µ-IM), a well-established process, could introduce many advantages. First of all, AM could avoid the need for the time-consuming and expensive fabrication of molds for small series of customized products. In this work, the feasibility, quality, and reliability of an AM/µ-IM process chain were evaluated by designing and fabricating mold inserts for µ-IM by stereolithography (SLA) technology; the mold inserts were characterized and tested experimentally. The selected geometry is composed of four thin cavities: This particular feature represents an actual challenge for both the SLA and µ-IM perspective due to the large surface-to-volume ratio of the cavity. Two different materials were used for the mold fabrication, showing sharply different performance in terms of endurance limit and cavity degradation. The obtained results confirm that the µ-IM process, exploiting an SLA fabricated mold insert, is feasible but requires great accuracy in material choice, mold design, fabrication, and assembly.