Micro Machining of Glass with Ball End Mill

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The Lab on a chip such as micro TASs, which is the inspection plates for a small amount of samples, has become popular in the bio or chemical industries. Although chemical etching with hydrofluoric acid has been mainly applied to manufacturing of the chips so far, the processes requires the long time to complete manufacturing with hazardous operations. This study presents glass milling to machine the micro channels on the plates instead of etching. The results may be summarized as follows :(1)A 7-axis machine tool, which consists of the control unit of the tool inclination and the driving unit of the machine table, is developed to machine the micro grooves on the glass plates with keeping the tool inclination. The machining process can be controlled in two manners : the bitmap control and the programmed control. Because most of the cutting operations are performed to machine two-dimensional pattern, the bitmap control can be applied practically.(2)The milling process is applied to mach … More ining of the micro grooves 15-20μm deep and 150-175μm wide on the glass in a feed of the cutter. The ball end mill made of tungsten carbide is used to reduce the machining cost and suppress crack propagation with large edge roundness. A crack-fee surface can be finished in water at a rotational speed of 20000rpm and at a feed rate of 0.48mm/min with the ball end mill inclined at an angle of 45 deg as a set of the applicable cutting conditions. Some models are presented to discuss the effect of the cutter axis inclination on brittle fracture, the surface finish, the cutting temperature during cutting, and the tool wear. Finally a DNA micro array is manufactured to improve the identification of the DNA sequence as a practical application of the presented machining. The micro drains 15μm and 20μm deep with the micro asperities can be fabricated on the glass in milling with the ball end mills in the applicable cutting conditions.(3)A milling tool is developed to improve the production rate by the change of the number of the edges and the edge shape. The developed tool enables us to remove the glass without brittle fracture at 10 times higher feed rate than that of the conventional tool. Less