Micro cutting of steel

Micro-cutting offers good potentialities in order to manufacture small and medium lot sizes of micro-parts with arbitary geometry at an economically reasonable expense. Either by direct machining or as a means to fabricate moulds for micro injection moulding, the major advantages turn out to be large removal rates, good compliance with tolerance ranges, high surface quality and a wide choice of materials which can be processed. Particularly if highly wear resistant materials are to be processed, as it is the case in mould fabrication for powder injection moulding, micro cutting of steel is a very eligible option. Consequently, the possibility to manufacture wear resistant micro structures of high aspect ratios by mechanical cutting is demonstrated with regard to its specific requirements in terms of transferability of the laboratory process into an industrial manufacturing process. Accordingly the paper focuses on process parameters and repeatability of machining results and machining capabilities.The work presented here is part of a cooperation of various institutes at the University of Karlsruhe and the Research Center of Karlsruhe (FZK) and is financially funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft DFG (german society for research). The close cooparation with the Institute of Material Science and Engineering (iwkl) of the University of Karlsruhe (TH) has been particularly beneficial for this research. The experiments with modifications of the tool were carried out at Forschungszentrum Rossendorf.