A novel mask electrochemical additive and subtractive combined manufacturing technique for microstructures with high machining performance

In this paper, a novel mask electrochemical additive and subtractive combined manufacturing technique was proposed. This is a machining method at the atomic level, and it can be used to produce metal microstructures with high-profile accuracy and low surface roughness. Due to the accumulation of electric field lines during mask electrochemical deposition, the height of the edges of the microcolumns is usually twice or more than the height of the central position in the deposition plane. A combined machining method based on the electric-field constraint of the mask is thus proposed to improve the accuracy of the profile and its surface roughness. The feasibility of the proposed method was verified by both simulations and experiments. The height difference between the column center and the surrounding layer on the surface of nickel microcolumns was reduced from 13 to 2 µm, and the roughness of the tops of the microcolumns was also improved. Experiments to examine electrolysis leveling were carried out to verify the correctness of the results of the simulations and theoretical calculations. Finally, the parameters were optimized using orthogonal experiments, and an array of nickel microcolumns with a diameter of 200 µm and a height of nearly 50 µm was obtained using these optimal parameters. The profile accuracy and surface roughness of the high-precision microcolumn array were improved by using the mask electrochemical additive and subtractive combined machining technique, and a high-precision microcolumn array structure was manufactured.