Proceedings of the
9th International Conference of Nanomanufacturing (nanoMan2024)
December 1 – 4, 2024, Singapore
Defect-Free Replication of Polymeric Micro Structures Using Novel Ni-PTFE Nanocomposite Moulds
Centre of Micro/Nano Manufacturing Technology (MNMT-Dublin), School of Mechanical & Materials Engineering, University College Dublin, Dublin 4, Ireland.
ABSTRACT
Demoulding defects like pile up plastic deformation and damage has constrained the quality of mass production of plastic micro products, such as microfluidic chips and optical gratings. A high-performance Ni-PTFE nanocomposite mould was fabricated for defects-free demoulding along with quantitative measurement of demoudling force. The Ni-PTFE nanocomposite mould performance was compared with pure Ni mould in terms of demoulding feature integrity, demoulding force, friction, wear and surface adhesion. Results consistently show that Ni-PTFE nanocomposite mould give profound surface integrity of microstructures with significant reduction of demoulding forces under various experiment conditions; the composite mould also displays 38% reduction in friction coefficient, while 5 times extended tool life, much less tool wear and adhesion compared to pure Ni mould. These micro injection moulding processes validated the self-lubrication properties of the Ni-PTFE nanocomposite mould for defect-free production of polymeric micro surface structures.
Keywords: Nanocomposite mould, Defect-free production, Micro injection moulding, Demoulding force, PTFE nanoparticle.
