Electrochemical Micromachining of Complex Shapes on Nickel and Nickel-Based Superalloys

This paper proposes a high-precision electrochemical micromachining (EMM) system. By applying nanosecond pulses, workpiece dissolution can be restricted to a very small area around the microelectrode. First, an EMM system that meets the requirements of the EMM process is built. Second, sets of comparative experiments are performed on pure nickel and superalloy plates to study the effects of main machining parameters, e.g., pulse on time, applied voltage, pulse period, and electrode diameters, on side gap. Finally, after the preliminary experiments, complex microshapes with characteristic size of several tens of micrometers are successfully fabricated on the nickel and superalloy plates, thereby demonstrating that EMM is a very promising microfabrication technology.