ECDM With Force Feedback Feeding System

Micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) have been widely used inconsumer electronics, health care, automotives and other fields. Glass isregarded as the indispensable material of MEMS systems because of itsfavorable properties, such as high hardness, high brittleness, wearresistance, chemical inertness, insulation, optical transparent and excellentproperties of bio-compatibility. Electrochemical discharge machining(ECDM) is an effective unconventional micro-machining technology toprocess electrically non-conducting materials. When processing smallholes with ECDM, its machining depth, machining quality, repeatability,and material removal rate have not yet reached the requirements oflarge-scale industrial production. To solve the problems, the mechanismand characteristics of ECDM were discussed in this dissertation.Experimental investigations were also carried out on ECDM method withforce feedback feeding system and the vibration-assisted ECDM.Before the study of the mechanism and characteristics of ECDM, thebasic principle of ECDM was introduced and its machining mechanismwas analyzed. The voltage–current characteristics of ECDM were explored. The impacts of electrolyte concentration and tool electrode reaction areaon the voltage–current characteristics were discussed. Based on thediscussion, the relationship between the optimal machining voltage and thetool electrode reaction area was derived.ECDM method with force feedback feeding system was proposed inthis dissertation. An EDM experimental platform with force feedbackfeeding system was set up. Compared with the regular ECDM system,ECDM platform with force feedback feeding system can improve themachining quality, the processing efficiency and the machiningrepeatability.To improve the machining performance of ECDM in hole drilling, anew method named vibration-assisted ECDM was proposed. The effectof mechanical vibration parameters on the performance of processing werestudied through a series of experiments. It was found that the new methodimproved the depth and accuracy of the holes.