ABSTRACT
Polymers lend themselves to fabrication using high-rate and continuous processing. Some of the potential new products include extruded multicomponent thin films for conformable, high-density data or energy storage; injection-molded low-cost calibration standards, electrospun nanowires; and nanotex-tiles for circuits. Nanomanufacturing of polymers is likely to look quite different from current macroscale processes. While isothermal mold filling may impose such restrictions on the polymeric materials, the surface of the mold wall will probably the standard P20 steel. In preliminary trials, silicon-based tooling failed to completely release the polymers, whereas electroformed nickel from a Electroformed nickel master had no residual polymeric material on the tooling surface. The mold temperature increased with depth ratio with most polymers, but had little effect on the feature definition of the molded parts. This behavior was not unexpected since isothermal or near isothermal mold filling has been promoted for better quality micromolded parts.
