Laser micro manufacturing of moulds and forming parts

摘要

The manufacturing of micro parts is mainly done in silicon, where manufacturing technologies from electronic production can be used. In cases, where the mechanical and structural properties of silicon are not sufficient or the costs of silicon micro parts can not be effort, other materials like polymers and metals have to be used. In this cases laser technologies can be a versatile tool for the production of tools, like moulds and stamping and embossing tools or the micro parts directly. Short pulse lasers, especially frequency-tripled, diode pumped Nd:YAG-lasers with a high beam quality offer the possibility to ablate these materials with high quality. With a spot size of about 10 μm, high fluences (>100 J/cm~(2)) can be achieved, so that the materials are vaporised without or with only a small amount of molten material. This technique is applicable for the production of micro tools with accuracies <10 μm at three dimensional microstructures. With optimised machining parameters the surface roughness can be reduced to R_(a)≤0.1 μm.. Depending on the material and the machining parameters the slicing thickness is in the range of 1 to 10 μm.