Design, fabrication, and assembly of a micro-compression set-up

Abstract

The potential high productivity, high yield and low environmental impact of microforming process to produce miniaturized components for biomedical applications, semiconductor, optical equipments and various other industries makes it an attractive alternative compared to other processes such as micro-machining and lithography. However, current microforming technologies commonly derives most concepts from macro scale metal forming, which does not take into account the size effects due to the miniaturization of the workpiece. As such, upsetting experiments to study the material flow stress under controlled strain rate is proposed to study the size effects at room temperature as well as elevated temperatures. In order to facilitate the carrying out of the experiment, a new piezoelectric actuated micro-press is designed with focus on maximizing rigidity. Computer Aided Design software – SolidWorks was used to visualize the design and finite element analysis software – ANSYS Workbench was used to simulate the resulting deflection of the design under piezoactuator loading. Iterations between drawing and analysis were conducted to refine the design for rigidity performance improvement, cost and weight reduction as well as mechanism design criteria. The resulting design is a new micro-press that gives expected total vertical deflection of 7.6ìm under piezoactuator loading of 5kN. The fabrication and assembly of the micro-press was also completed along with the mounting of load cell and electrical isolation of piezoactuator from the micro-press body. The completed micro-press will be used to begin the further research of size effects in microforming in accordance with the Undergraduate Research Experience on Campus (URECA) programme in Nanyang Technological University (NTU).