Laser Dieless Drawing Process for Metal Micro-Tubes

A drawing process using tools such as dies, plugs and mandrels has been conventionally applied as a means of miniaturizing tubes. However, it is not easy to scale down the conventional process to micro sizes for many reasons related to the tools used in the process. It is difficult to fabricate micro tools with high accuracy, and to insert a plug or a mandrel into a fine tube. Thus, the development of new drawing technologies for the fabrication of micro-tubes without the need for tools such as dies, plugs and mandrels is necessary. A laser dieless drawing technique with local heating using a laser as the heating source has been focused on for the fabrication of micro-tubes. In this study, a dieless drawing with a semiconductor laser setup is designed and developed. A tube of stainless steel, SUS304, with an outer diameter of 0.52mm and thickness of 0.1mm is used in the experiments. A laser dieless drawing experiment is carried out to investigate the effect of the laser power and drawing speed on the drawing limit. Finally, the effectiveness of laser dieless drawing process is discussed.