Investigation of micro-drilling using electrochemical discharge machining with counter resistant feeding

Electrochemical discharge machining (ECDM) is a promising technology for 3D microstructuring of glass and other non-conductive materials. ECDM is a table-top technology that requires no clean room and has a modest space usage and therefore making ECDM suitable for microfactories. Nowadays, gravity-feed drilling is the most commonly used method for micro hole drilling with ECDM. However, experiments show that gravity-feed set-up may lead to many issues that lower the repeatability of machining. In this paper, a new method is proposed to achieve effective micro-drilling, under the name of counter resistant micro-hole drilling. Furthermore, the varied force acting on machining process was investigated. The experiments demonstrated that reproducible machining was significantly improved over the conventional gravity-feed method. Meanwhile, a systematic analysis of this new drilling method was characterized. The experiments showed that the force is one of the key factors that influence the drilling process, especially in the hydrodynamic regime.