Measurement and Process Control in Precision Hot Embossing

Microfluidic technologies hold a great deal of promise in advancing the medical field, but transitioning them from research to commercial production has proven problematic. We propose precision hot embossing as a process to produce high volumes of devices with low capital cost and a high degree of flexibility. Hot embossing has not been widely applied to precision forming of hard polymers at viable production rates. To this end we have developed experimental equipment capable of maintaining the necessary precision in forming parameters while minimizing cycle time. In addition, since equipment precision alone does not guarantee consistent product quality, our work also focuses on real-time sensing and diagnosis of the process. This paper covers both the basic details for a novel embossing machine, and the utilization of the force and displacement data acquired during the embossing cycle to diagnose the state of the material and process. The precision necessary in both the forming machine and the instrumentation will be covered in detail. It will be shown that variation in the material properties (e.g. thickness, glass transition temperature) as well as the degree of bulk deformation of the substrate can be detected from these measurements. If these data are correlated with subsequent downstream functional tests, a total measure of quality may be determined and used to apply closed-loop cycle-to-cycle control to the entire process. By incorporating automation and specialized precision equipment into a tabletop “microfactory” setting, we aim to demonstrate a high degree of process control and disturbance rejection for the process of hot embossing as applied at the micron scale.

Investigations on the Effect of Coating Material and Method on Die Wear in Stamping of Advanced High Strength Steels

Despite the advantages of advanced high strength steels (AHSS), their stamping into functional lightweight parts demands prolonged die life, which necessitates the use of alternative substrates, coating materials, and/or surface conditioning to minimize and delay the die wear. In order to avoid frequent die replacement and surface quality problems on the stamped parts, the metalworking industry has been investigating various approaches such as reducing/refining the carbide particles, adding alloying elements, and elevating the hardness and toughness values for both substrate materials and coatings. The objective of this work was to investigate the effects of different coatings on the wear behavior of a some selected tool steel materials (die sample of interest) against two different AHSS sheet blanks through a cylinder-on-flat type reciprocating test method. After wear tests, both die sample and sheet blank surface were microscopically examined. Wear resistance of the slider was quantified from wear scar width measurements. Results showed that TD and CVD coated die samples performed better than the two other PVD coated samples.

Processing and Analysis of Ceramic Mesoscale Combustors Fabricated by Co-Extrusion

In this work, millimeter-scale tubular combustion channels were fabricated from ceramic precursor materials. Co-extrusion of structured feedrods holds promise for the development of multi-layered, functionally graded and/or textured combustor walls, but requires a polymer binder that is difficult to remove before structures can be sintered to full density. In conventional thermal debinding, cracking is a major issue, where crack formation is attributed to a lack of pore space for outgassing of pyrolysis products. The main focus of this study is to validate a manufacturing process that uses a combination of solvent de-binding and thermal debinding, which is applied to a simple combustor geometry. Alumina powder was batched with a mixture of polyethylene butyl-acrylate (PEBA) and polyethylene glycol (PEG) in a torque rheometer. A 19mm feedrod, consisting of a carbon-black/binder mixture as core, and a surrounding ceramic/binder mixture forming the wall, was extruded through a 5.84 mm die. The binder removal involves two processing steps, where the PEG content was removed by solvent extraction (SE) to initiate pore formation, after which thermal de-binding by pyrolysis removes the remaining binder and carbon-black. Solvent extraction was performed in water at three different temperatures for various times. The 1:1 mixture of PEG:PEBA showed the highest PEG removal of 80wt% for 6 hrs extraction. The thermal de-binding cycle was designed based on thermo-gravimetric analysis (TGA) and successfully performed with a ramping rate of 1.25°C/min to 1000°C without any crack formation. After de-binding, samples were sintered at 1600°C for 1 hr. SEM analysis showed some void spaces in the solvent extracted samples but confirmed that solvent extraction followed by thermal de-binding yielded the best results. The viability of sintered ceramic tubes was tested for conditions typical for thermal cycling in a combustion environment.

Precision and Energy Usage for Additive Manufacturing

Market pressures on manufacturing enterprises incentivize minimum resource consumption while maintaining part quality. Facilities with advanced manufacturing tools often utilize rapid prototyping for production of complicated or specialty parts. Additive manufacturing offers an alternative to traditional production methods which are often time and resource expensive. This study aims to explore part quality and energy usage for additive manufacturing through a focused study of Fused Deposition Modeling and Photopolymer Jetting technologies. A control part is developed for maintaining test consistency across different machines. The control part design consists of various positive and negative features including width varied slots and walls, ramps, and curved features so that the manufacturing of different surfaces may be investigated. Several different machine models are tested to evaluate precision for a variety of applications. Part quality is quantified by measuring the surface roughness in two directions for the control test part printed on each machine. Qualitatively, part quality is assessed by positive and negative feature resolution. High quality machines resolve features closely to design specifications. Lower quality machines do not resolve some features. In addition to exploring the effects of advertised print precision, layup density is varied on two machines. Advertised print resolution does not well represent the achievable feature sizes found in this study. Energy usage is quantified by measuring electricity demands while printing the control part on each of the five different machines. Power consumption in additive manufacturing is found to follow a distinct pattern comprised of standby, warm up, printing and idle phases. Measurement and analysis suggest a relationship between the precision of these machines and their respective energy demand. Part quality is found to generally improve with increased initial and process resource investment. The energy and quality assessment methods developed in this study are applicable to a greater variety of additive manufacturing technologies and will assist designers as additive manufacturing becomes more production friendly. The presented data also provides designers and production planners insight for improvements in the process decision making.

Tunable and Transferrable Bar Feeder Damping Design for Advanced Manufacturing

The economical production of high-value, low-volume, machined components is an important subtopic of advanced manufacturing. Bar feeders, a well-established technology for adding a high degree of automation to CNC turning centers by feeding 12′ lengths of stock through the machine spindle, have limitations in this realm. They rely on supporting the entire length of the stock in a continuous fluid bearing in order to suppress potential vibrations. Although this results in excellent vibration suppression, long tooling changeovers make them impractical for small batch sizes. Additionally, the expense of the tooling can render them cost-prohibitive. Thus a bar feeder technology is desired that provides comparable vibration suppression for a wide variety of stock sizes without the need for size-specific tooling changes. In this, a movable point support having tunable viscoelastic properties is studied for controlling the vibration of varying lengths of bar stock in a given speed range. The transverse vibration of mounted bar stock is modeled as a Bernoulli-Euler beam. The effects of the support position, viscoelastic model, and their associated parameters on the resonant frequencies, damping ratios, and vibration response of the bar stock are studied. Such a study will be instrumental in developing passive/active vibration control strategies for future bar feeders.

Complex Sparse-Filled Mechanical Property Prediction Methods for Direct Digital Manufacturing

This paper describes how direct digital manufacturing mechanical properties can be analytically estimated for structural use and the associated analytical and test methods used in the design and fabrication of airframes manufactured using additive manufacturing. Complex shape structures, which are now possible using additive manufacturing, and their associated mechanical properties can be predicted in order to allow operationally safe and highly predictive structures to be fabricated. Direct digital manufacturing allows for much greater flexibility and control over the design of airframes, leading to more structurally efficient and capable airframes. These advantages are revealed by application of direct digital manufacturing methods on a series of fixed wing subsonic transport concept wind tunnel scale models that are carried out as a part of the NASA N+3 program, which is paving the way for next generation aircraft that are highly fuel efficient, low-noise, and low-emission. Verification of these methods through test shows excellent correlation that provides reliability in complex sparse filled additive manufacturing design. The outcome of this is a knowledge base, which can then be applied to a system in operation. The combined potential of a flexible manufacturing system and proven predictive analysis tools shorten development time and expand the opportunities for mass customization. These combined benefits enable industry to fabricate affordable highly optimized custom products while concurrently reducing the cycle times required to field new products.

Investigation of New Generation of Ceramic and Single Crystalline Piezo Materials for Helicopter Blade and UAV Actuation

A great amount of research is being conducted to incorporate smart material actuators in aerospace applications such as (1) turbo fan engines (2) servo flap actuators for helicopter rotor control. For example, a piezoelectric stack actuator, coupled with mechanical or hydraulic amplification could provide the actuation required for the variable pitch fan system with a potentially higher level of reliability. In addition, piezoelectric actuation system could do so at a lower overall weight. However, there are limitations with existing piezoelectric stack actuators relative to power requirements. Therefore, a new approach has been investigated to improve these characteristics in order for piezoelectric stacks to be a feasible solution for these types of large scale applications. A new configuration involving dielectric, conductor, piezoelectric material in a particular sequence of stack actuation is examined and experimented. A nonlinear lumped parameter model of a piezoelectric stack has been developed to describe the behavior for the purpose of control actuation analysis.

Application of Optical Scanning and Photogrammetry for Evaluation of Geometrical Tolerance Values

The hereby presented research, funded by the restricted grant LIDER, NCBiR, deals, in part, with the identification of the full implementation potential of the proposed optical measurement techniques in determination of surface flatness parameters, and their comparative assessment. The test methods included the photogrammetric measurement technique (TRITOP, GOM) and the structural light scanning approach (scanner ATOS, GOM), while the CMM measurement (DEA Global Image Clima) was the reference method. The accordingly designed and assembled experimental test stand comprised 2 steel plates. The test surfaces of the plates were appropriately ground; subsequently, the entire test stand was blackened to ascertain efficient optical scanning. Furthermore, the plates were connected by means of 8 screws, thus introducing considerable distortion. A measurement area of 140 × 240 mm was defined on the plate test surface, as determined by CMM, denoting 15 measurement paths of 240 mm in length, distributed every 10 mm, and characterized by measurement point densities of 1, 5, and 20 pt/mm. The reference CMM measurements were conducted on 3 consecutive days at different times (22 measurements in total) to exclude any possible surface modifications. Subsequently, optical scanning was applied and the measurement points lying at the cross-sections of the CMM measurement paths were isolated from the obtained polygon mesh. To further apply the photogrammetric method, the test surface was labeled with markers distributed every 10 mm and coinciding with the CMM measurement paths. Comparative analysis of the flatness parameter for the selected CMM measurement and the measurement values obtained by means of the tested optical methods included: - the entire measurement area, - the sections comprising 80, 60, 50, 45, 40, 30, 20, 15, and 10 % of the entire measurement area, decreasing centrically, - the measurement sub-areas of 30 × 50 mm allotted in the corners and in the center of the test plate. The photogrammetric error of the tested parameter was established at 1.26–19.82 %, depending on the size of the measurement area. The corresponding error value, as determined by the structural light scanning technique, amounted to 0.03–4.31 %.

Experimental Study on Electromagnetic Forming of Copper Sheets

The sheet metal forming of copper, aluminum alloys using conventional stamping processes posses various problems, because of the lower formability limits, spring back and the tendency to wrinkle compared to steel. The principle of electromagnetism using attractive force is adopted to modify the conventional stamping process, to form thin sheets of 0.05 mm thickness. Further, this process can be used to form many sheet metal components with less expensive tooling and lesser number of operations. This process ultimately leads to light weight, cost effective and better strength-to-weight ratio components required for aerospace applications. In this study, a maximum of 30.77 % reduction in diameter was observed at 2.75A using electromagnetic forming which leads to the absence of spring back.

Experimental Investigation of Selective Laser Melting of Lunar Regolith for In-Situ Applications

Selective Laser Melting (SLM) is a powder based Additive manufacturing (AM) technology which builds an object layer wise using a laser beam to melt the powder on an elevated platform. Thus far numerous studies have investigated lunar manufacturing methods and construction but little is known about applicability of SLM of lunar regolith. As most lunar construction proposals require transportation of essential materials from Earth, using an in-situ manufacturing method with indigenous material would be considerably more economical. Fabrication of parts with SLM using various metals and ceramics has already been presented. As such, the feasibility of using lunar regolith mixture to create functional parts with SLM process is investigated. Variation of process parameters such as laser power, scan speed, and scan strategies is investigated and multiple 3D objects are successfully created and presented.