Vibration chiseling: A backward-moving cutting for the high-efficiency fabrication of short metallic microfibers

This study proposes a rapid process for fabricating metallic microfibers: vibration chiseling. A parallelogram-shaped vibration is superimposed on the tool using a two-dimensional non-resonant vibration device, while the tool moves backward relative to conventional cutting. In this way, the material can be chiseled out from the surface as a chip during each vibration cycle to form a microfiber. Increasing the tool vibration frequency allows the short fibers to be produced rapidly. The tool vibration trajectory, tool shape, backward-moving velocity, and depth of cut (DoC) are the crucial parameters that control the microfiber’s geometries. Machining tests have been conducted on copper under different tool-moving velocities and DoC to verify the efficacy of the proposed process. Copper microfibers with a length of tens to hundreds of microns and a diameter of 2 ∼ 4 µm have been successfully fabricated, demonstrating that vibration chiseling has good reproducibility, controllability, and efficiency.