State of the art in micro forming

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.