Manufacturing of micro thin-walled metal parts by micro-droplet deposition

Metal micro-droplet deposition manufacturing technique is a novel direct metal rapid prototyping for building the miniaturized parts. In this paper, the novel direct metal rapid prototyping was proposed to fabricate micro thin-walled metal parts. A direct droplet fabrication experimental system was developed based on the forming principle of micro-droplet deposition manufacture. Several deposition experiments were conducted to investigate the influences of process parameters on the formed wall thickness and deposition accuracy of droplets. The experimental results show that the proper deposition distance Hs for obtaining high deposition accuracy of droplet ranges from 1 mm to 20 mm; the formed wall thickness W can be controlled by selecting different nozzle diameters D and formed angle of deposited droplet H. According to the experiment results, a micro thin-walled structure with wall thickness of 400 mu m was fabricated by adjusting the process parameters. The above research works show that it is feasible to fabricate the micro thin-walled metal parts by micro-droplet deposition manufacturing technique. Crown Copyright (C) 2011 Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.