In Situ Fabrication of Ribbed Wire Electrodes for Wire Electrochemical Micromachining

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Wire electrochemical micromachining (WECMM) is an electrochemical machining method in which a tensioned wire is used as the tool electrode. This paper proposes a novel method for in situ fabrication of ribbed wire electrodes. By applying high-speed rotation and reciprocating travelling to the ribbed wire electrode, the recycling of the electrolyte in the machining gap of WECMM was assumed to be accelerated, and this was helpful in the machining of high-aspect-ratio microstructures. Experiments were conducted to investigate the effects of pulse frequency, pulse duty cycle and electrolyte concentration on the ribbed groove size. Using optimized parameters, a ribbed wire electrode with a series of ribbed grooves, 113 gm in width and 100 gm in depth, was successfully fabricated. Finally, the feasibility of WECMM using a ribbed wire electrode was verified experimentally. A microstructure with wall widths of 230 gm and an aspect ratio of 87 was successfully fabricated fro m a stainless steel block 20 mm in thickness.