A high rate of production of complex microparts is increasingly required by fields like electronics and micromechanics. Handling is one of the main problems, limiting those forming processes of small metal components consisting of multiple forming stages. A forming chain in which a metal strip acts both as raw material and support of the workpiece through the different stages of the process, is seen as a solution that radically simplifies the positioning of microparts. Each workpiece stays connected to the strip through all the forming steps, being separated just at the end of the process chain. In this work, a tooling system for the bulk forming from copper strips has been set up and employed in a full forward extrusion process of a micro-billet. The same die, with a diameter of 1 mm, has been used with three different strip thicknesses (1, 2 and 3 mm) and three different material conditions. The use of thinner and hard-as-rolled strips has resulted in achieving a higher ratio of the billet length to strip thickness.
Simulation of a Full Forward Extrusion Process from Metal Strip
