Microforming—from basic research to its realization

Size effects in manufacturing of metallic components

State of the art in micro forming and investigations into micro deep drawing

Micro forming is an appropriate technology to manufacture very small metal parts, in particular for bulk production, as they are required in many industrial products resulting from microtechnology. This paper gives a review of the state of the art in micro forming of metals. The occurring problems in miniaturisation of forming technologies like micro massive forming and micro sheet metal forming are described. One of the problems are scaling effects, which, e.g. occur in tribological aspects like the friction coefficient, which increases with decreasing specimen size. Scaling effects do not only appear within the process but must be taken into account in all other areas of the forming process chain, demanding finally new solutions especially on tool manufacturing and machine concepts.

State of the art in micro forming

Product miniaturization is an emerging trend for facilitating product usage, enabling unique product functions to be implemented in micro-scaled geometries and features, and further reducing product weight and volume. Recently, a demand for microparts increased significantly in many industry clusters. Development of the advanced micromanufacturing technologies for fabrication of such microparts has thus become a critical issue. Microforming, which offers attractive characteristics including high productivity, low cost and good quality of the formed parts, provides a promising approach to fabricating metallic microparts. In the last two decades, a lot of effort has been made to the researches on size effect related deformation behaviors in microforming process and the development of the process. Having a panorama of these researches is necessary to support micropart design and development via microforming, and further advance this micromanufacturing process. In this paper, an intensive review on the latest development of microforming technologies is presented. First of all, the paper is focused on the review of the size effect-affected deformation behaviors and the mechanisms of the changes of flow stress, flow behavior, fracture behavior, elastic recovery, tooling–workpiece interfacial friction and the surface finish of the formed parts. The state-of-the-art microforming processes, including micro deep drawing, microembossing, micropunching, microcoining, microextrusion, microheading, and micro progressive forming are then presented. Finally, some research issues from the implementation of mass production perspective are also discussed.

Kaname Yasuda

Papers

Microdeep drawability of very thin sheet steels