In the past many qualified technologies have been established for the manufacture of optical, precision and micro parts as well as precision structured surfaces. In this field mechanical machining processes, like diamond machining, play a dominant role. Novel mechanical manufacturing processes, further development of ultra precision machine tools and the precision machining of challenging mater...

Laser assisted machining is an alternative to conventional machining of hard and/or difficult-to-process materials which involves pre-heating of a focused area with a laser beam over the surface of the workpiece to cause localized thermal softening along the path of the cutting action. The main advantage that laser assisted machining has over conventional machining is the increased material rem...

Micro-groove is one of the most important features in mechanical, electronic, photonic, and bio-medical components. In recent years, fabircation of micro-grooves became increasingly important with an advancement of product miniaturisation. It is realised that in micro-machining of grooves, the principal problem is the presence of burrs along the feature edges and also the profile inaccuracy aff...

This paper presents the development of Artificial Neural Network (ANN) models for the prediction of laser machined internal micro-channels’ dimensions and production costs. In this work, a pulsed Nd:YVO4 laser was used for machining micro-channels in polycarbonate material. Six ANN multi-layered, feed-forward, back-propagation models are presented which were developed on three different trainin...

Among all non-conventional micro-machining, electrochemical discharge machining (ECDM) is having high quality of material removal rate with zero residual stress. This machining has been accepted as a highly modern technology in micromachining. In this paper an effort has been done on micro drilling of glass using electrochemical discharge machining (ECDM). A fixed tool and a step down transform...

Present manufacturing industries are facing challenges from these advanced materials viz. super alloys, ceramics, and composites, that are hard and difficult to machine, requiring high precision, surface quality which increases machining cost. To meet these challenges, non-conventional machining processes are being employed to achieve higher metal removal rate, better surface finish and greater...

Metal alloys have material properties that are very appealing for micro electro mechanical systems (MEMS), but present a challenge for process integration within a lithographic manufacturing sequence of the type used in the semiconductor industry. The batch-mode micro electrodischarge machining (μEDM) discussed here uses lithographically-fabricated electrode arrays with high density and high un...

The paper offers evidence on the feasibility of a newly proposed micro-machining process, which is motivated by the need to overcome the various limitations associated with μ-EDM and conventional ultra-short laser micro-machining processes. The limitations in μ-EDM and laser micromachining processes are mainly due to the requirement of a conductive electrode and workpiece, electrode wear and co...

Micro-electrical discharge machining is an evolution of conventional EDM used for fabricating three-dimensional complex micro-components and microstructures with high precision capabilities. The material removal process has stochastic nature and is still not fully understood. This paper presents experimental results on observing the material removal rate (MRR) in dependence of alternating machi...