ABSTRACT
The colossal requirement of miniaturization due to technological advancements has had a great impact on manufacturing industries. The advent of non-conventional manufacturing techniques like EDM, LBM, IBM, ECM, etc., has made manufacturing procedures more precise and contactless. The complexity, machining time, and cost of machining using these nontraditional methods is something that is to be justified in the machining of micro-components. Thus, the need of the hour is to understand the processes which serve the production rates as well as the aforementioned business aspects to encapsulate the industrial demands and comprehend about the miniaturization of the macro-conventional machining methods terming it as micromachining processes. Micro-machining has been applied to various industrial regimes like automobiles, aerospace, electronics, and bio-medical fields to manufacturing various components like turbines, pumps, etc., for their micro-scale applications. The micro-size ranges from 1–999 µm, which is either considered over the whole workpiece or some micro-features on the macro-components. This instantiates the prerequisite of a thorough comprehension of side effects. The cutting-edge radius effect is negligible in the conventional methods as the uncut chip thickness is quite large, and tool can be considered acicular. The various effects like the grain size, micro-structure effect, cutting edge radius, etc., drive these micro-machining methods. The 264type of material deformation mechanism becomes a critical characteristic co-related to the surface quality (SQ). The micro-end milling process is found to be the scaled-down version of the conventional method, similar in the operational aspect but different in terms of the cutting phenomena and material removal mechanisms. This portion of the book will give emphasis on comprehension of micro-end milling process and the impact of the cutting-edge radius effect on the removal mechanisms. It will also enlighten on the burr formation technicalities, cutting forces that are encountered and its interdependence on the removal mechanisms, tool wear aspects for process monitoring alongside the modern methods that are incorporated, and surface finish aspect to address the quality of the work surface.
