Microforming of Stainless Steel Miniature Pump by Additive Sheet-Manufacturing

Micro-pump had an integrated structure including the valves, the reservoir, the actuating plates and so forth as designed for each application. Various liquid as well as viscous media popped in and out through this unit; each element must have sufficient strength and toughness as well as well-defined accuracy in geometry and dimension. In particular, high leak proof is the highest requirement for this micro-pump in working at the medical operation, at the drug delivery and at the blood transportation. The additive sheet-manufacturing was proposed to make micro-forming of these miniature mechanical elements, devices and systems. This process consisted of three steps. Fist, the original CAD data for a micro-pump were sliced into an assembly of geometric models for each perforated and embossed sheet form. In second, a pair of miniature punch and die was fabricated by the plasma printing process after each geometric model. Then, each bare sheet element was micro-pierced and micro-embossed to transform each CAD-model to each shaped stainless steel sheet element. Finally, the assembly of sheet elements was plasma surface-activated and integrated into the tailored micro-pump by micro-joining. This top-to-down and down-to-top methodology in the above is discussed for further improvement of additive sheet-manufacturing.