Surface roughness of microstructured component fabricated by μMIM

Pulsed laser polishing of micro-milled Ti6Al4V samples

“…However, these meso/microparts have unique tribology issues because of the variety of materials and the surface conditions (including surface roughness and waviness) produced by the different meso/micromanufacturing processes. Achieving sufficient precision in these parts is becoming more of a challenge because surface roughness levels are approaching part tolerances [1][2][3]. Additionally, the surface roughness of microparts can present problems.…”

A review of micro-powder injection moulding as a microfabrication technique

“…Commonly used binder systems include: polyolefin/wax compounds and POM (polyacetal)based systems. The former has been used extensively (usually with LDPE or HDPE) for subsequent thermal debinding [7,10,22,29,29,46], whilst the latter has been used together with catalytic debinding [7,13,24,31,32,45,46,90] PVA-based binders [33] and EVA (ethylene vinyl acetate)-based binders [8,33]. Different binder systems have been used in μPIM to produce all categories of micro-components, i.e.…”

Fabrication of metal matrix composites by metal injection molding—A review

“…Furthermore, existing microfabrication methods, such as X-ray lithography, electro-forming and excimer laser ablation, have the drawbacks of either low productivity and high production cost or constrained material availability. To overcome these disadvantages, micrometal injection molding (MIM) has been established as a promising route to the mass production of metallic microcomponents (Merz et al, 2004;Tay et al, 2005;Liu et al, 2002). Micrometal injection molding (MIM) is the miniaturization of the conventional metal injection molding process (MIM) and it inherits the features of conventional MIM such as low production cost, geometric complexity, near net-shape, good tolerance and reproducibility (Rota et al, 2002).…”