Mechanical micro deep drawing becomes a more and more industrial relevant process.
But due to size effects new challenges are involved in this process compared to macro deep
drawing. The size effects cause an increase of friction and thus hinder the material flow. The change
of friction in mechanical micro deep drawing is subject of the presented investigations in this paper.
Additionally to this, a new non-mechanical micro deep drawing process is presented, whereby a
laser beam acts as a punch. This new laser deep drawing process is based on a totally different
mechanism compared to thermal laser forming, e.g. forming by laser induced thermal stresses: The
laser produces a pulse with an extremely high power density, which causes plasma generation at the
target and thus a shock wave. The shock wave can be used as in explosive forming, but is smaller
and easier to generate. Recent investigations showed that using this technology laser deep drawing
is possible with a sheet metal out of Al 99.5 and a thickness of 50 'm. The deep drawing process
was carried out with a die diameter of 4 mm and shows promising results.
Experimental and numerical investigation on micro deep drawing process of stainless steel 304 foil using flexible tools
