Micro fabrication of stainless steel micro components using soft moulding and aqueous slurry

Presented is a fabrication process of stainless steel micro components. The fabrication process is divided into two main parts. In the first part, high quality SU-8 master moulds and their negative replicas from soft moulds are produced using photolithography and soft moulding techniques, respectively. The second part includes preparation of stainless steel slurry, filling the soft mould, obtaining the green parts, de-binding and sintering to the finial parts. The metallic slurry is investigated in details and the optimum dispersant and binder are obtained. Two different sintering conditions are investigated, vacuum and forming gas atmospheres. The effect of sintering atmospheres and temperatures on both density and linear shrinkage of the micro components are studied in details. The results show high quality micro components the same quality as the master moulds. The maximum sintered density and linear shrinkage are obtained when the samples are sintered in vacuum at 1350 °C and found to be 98.1% and 17.97%, respectively. The surface roughness of the sintered micro components is also investigated.