Integriertes Desktopmaschinensystem für die Herstellung und Anwendung ultrakleiner Mikroschleifwerkzeuge

Summary The fast change in today´s consumer society leads to a high demand for products with small simensions in various designs. Therefore, a high flexibility in manufacturing of these products is needed. The economical manufacturing of these products requires efficienty and reliable production systems. In mass production or batch production of micro-technical products processes often used are LiGA (German for: lithography, electroplating and molding), etching or LASER-machining (Light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation). These processes require a very high financial effort. Thus, they are only for mass production economically feasible. Micro machining is an alternative approach to these processes. Micro machining permits the production of complex three dimensional structures in a wide variety of materials in small batch sizes, ptototype and individual production. These structures, for example made of hard and brittle materials, are particularly wear resistant and can be used for mass production, like in molding applications. In micro machining (here especially micro grinding) the smallest productible structure dimension is depending on the tool size and the characteristics of the machine tool used. The smallest currently applicable tool has a diameter of approximateley twenty microns [Habe07]. Today, the requirements for the application of such small micro tools are meet very well by high precision- and ultra-precision machine tools. Nevertheless, these machine tools are in a very high disproportion to the size of the machined work pieces with regard to their energy consumption and machine space. This again is in a contradiction to the today´s ecological and economical demands on manufacturing technologies. Therefore, in this thesis the developement of an intefrares modular desktop machine tool system is described. This machine tool permits the manufactoring and application of ultra-small micro pencil grinding tools without re-clamping. Avoiding the re-claimping allows for a significant reduction of the dimension of the producible and applicable micro pencil grinding tools. Ultra-small micro pencil grinding tools with diameters down to 3 μm can be manufactured and used. The integrated desktop machine tool is a gantry type machine tool in modular design. The manufactoring of the micro pencil grinding tools is carried out in threee major steps: tool grinding, electroplating and optional design-optimizing by micro-electro discharge machining (μEDM) for better tool performance and process results. In a conventional tool manufacturing setuo, each of these three steps is carried out in a different machine tool. Furthermore, the tools are applied for grinding in a different machine tool.