Development of micromachine tool prototypes for microfactories

Abstract

At present, many areas of industry have strong tendencies towards miniaturization of products. Mechanical components of these products as a rule are manufactured using conventional large-scale equipment or micromechanical equipment based on microelectronic technology (MEMS). The first method has some drawbacks because conventional large-scale equipment consumes much energy, space and material. The second method seems to be more advanced but has some limitations, for example, two-dimensional (2D) or 2.5-dimensional shapes of components and materials compatible with silicon technology. In this paper, we consider an alternative technology of micromechanical device production. This technology is based on micromachine tools (MMT) and microassembly devices, which can be produced as sequential generations of microequipment. The first generation can be produced by conventional large-scale equipment. The machine tools of this generation can have overall sizes of 100–200 mm. Using microequipment of this generation, second generation microequipment having smaller overall sizes can be produced. This process can be repeated to produce generations of micromachine tools having overall sizes of some millimetres. In this paper we describe the efforts and some results of first generation microequipment prototyping. A micromachining centre having an overall size of 130 × 160 × 85 mm3 was produced and characterized. This centre has allowed us to manufacture micromechanical details having sizes from 50 µm to 5 mm. These details have complex three-dimensional shapes (for example, screw, gear, graduated shaft, conic details, etc), and are made from different materials, such as brass, steel, different plastics etc. We have started to investigate and to make prototypes of the assembly microdevices controlled by a computer vision system. In this paper we also describe an example of the applications (microfilters) for the proposed technology.

Limits, Modeling and Design of High-Speed Permanent Magnet Machines

“…Many academic institutions, mainly in Europe and Asia, have been directing efforts toward the development and commercialization of smaller, even desktop-sized micro-cutting machines. These efforts have resulted in a number of compact, three to five-axis, mainly micromilling machines [7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17].…”

Design of Ericsson Heat Engine with Micro Channel Recuperator

“…To manufacture this micro channel recuperator it is possible to use Micro Equipment Technology [14][15][16].…”

Limited Receptive Area neural classifier for texture recognition of metal surfaces

“…This paper continues the series of works on automation of micro assembly processes [3,4]. The LIRA neural classifier is proposed for texture recognition of mechanically treated metal surfaces.…”

“…The task of metal surface texture recognition is important to automate the assembly processes in micromechanics [3]. To assembly a device it is necessary to recognize the position and orientation of the work pieces to be assembled [4].…”

“…The main approaches to microdevice production are the technology of micro electromechanical systems (MEMS) [1,2] and microequipment technology (MET) [3][4][5][6]. To get the best of these technologies it is important to have advanced image recognition systems.…”