Title: Micro-channel generation on copper-foil by EMM process

Authors: M. Malapati; A. Sarkar; B. Bhattacharyya

Addresses: Department of Manufacturing Engineering, NIFFT, Ranchi-834 003, India. ' Department of Production Engineering, Jadavpur University, Kolkata-700 032, India. ' Department of Production Engineering, Jadavpur University, Kolkata-700 032, India

Abstract: Electrochemical micromachining (EMM) appears to be a very promising micromachining technique in nearby future. Use of copper as a conductive material in microchips needs generation of complex profiles in copper foil. EMM can be utilised for generating micro-profiles in copper foils, which urgently needs a lot of investigation. For fulfilling various research objectives and needs of EMM, the present research highlights the development of EMM system setup and feasibility study of machining micro-channels. Experimental investigation on the developed EMM setup considering the influence of process parameters on micromachining criterion have been performed based on Taguchi method of robust design. From the results, optimal parametric settings for the responses are electrolyte concentration of 50 g/l, applied voltage of 7 V, frequency of 30 kHz, duty factor of 0.15 and tool feed rate of 312.5 µm/s. Second order regression equations have also been developed to search out the best parametric combination for achieving different micromachining characteristics.

Keywords: electrochemical micromachining; EMM; microchannels; regression analysis; ECM; copper foil; conductive material; microchips.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMMM.2012.047833

International Journal of Machining and Machinability of Materials, 2012 Vol.11 No.4, pp.385 - 404

Received: 08 Dec 2010
Accepted: 22 Mar 2011
Published online: 23 Aug 2014 *

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