By Leibniz Institute for Solid State and Materials Research Dresden - IFW Dresden
Electrochemical micromachining (ECMM) is an advanced technique for micro-shaping metallic materials surfaces with very high precision. A special ECMM method using metallic micro-tools and ultrashort voltage pulses is applied for micromachining Fe-based and Zr-based bulk metallic glasses. A key challenge is to overcome the strong passivity of those alloys and to properly exploit the high transpassive reactivity for controlled anodic dissolution at micrometer dimension. In particular, for Fe-based glasses, suitable processing parameters could be identified for the generation of micro-holes with high aspect ratio and of complex micro-shapes. The single-phase glassy nature is beneficial for achieving very high precision. The setup which was developed at the IFW is useful also for other microelectrochemical approaches, e.g. local potential probing etc.
