Experimental Study on the Through-Mask Electrochemical Micromachining (EMM) Process

摘要

Surface texturing is a widely accepted approach for friction reduction in mechanical components. Through-mask electrochemical micromachining (EMM) is a simple and reliable process for mass manufacturing of microstructure array on metal surface. However, to obtain engineered surface texture with a prescribed shape, size, orientation, and distribution to investigate how forms and shapes of surface texturing affect the tribological properties on interacting surfaces, the machining conditions still need to be optimized. In this work, the electroetching conditions involving the formulation of the electrolyte, voltage, current density, machining gap and agitation method are optimized. With the optimized conditions, the ordered microstructures with a feature size down to 5μm and smooth etched surface in large-scale are obtained and the preliminary friction drag reduction effect of the textured surface is demonstrated.