SUMMARY

Micromilling is a production method that is preferred for the production of a wide variety of micro components, due to its high precision and flexibility. However, this method suffers from low productivity due to necessarily low feedrates and required high precision due to small feature size. An increase of productivity at the microscale requires consideration of unique microscale scale effects in process parameter selection to allow for increased material removal rate, improved stability, and reduced error. In this study, several of these scale effects are identified and investigated. The scale effects are shown to cause increase of process error in the application of the standard method of VF-NURBS feedrate optimization to the microscale. A modified VF-NURBS method is proposed and shown to successfully compensate for the scale effects and reduce geometric error. Scale effects are incorporated into the development of the Variable-Feedrate Intelligent Segmentation method for increased feedrates and improved stability. The new segmentation method is experimentally validated and shown to provide a cutting time reduction of more than 50% in some cases, while effectively constraining geometric error. A low cost/precision ratio micromilling machine is created by applying the mechatronic precision enhancements of velocity-based backlash compensation and conductive tool registration to a low-cost custom machine.