Spray-Formed Tooling with Micro-Scale Features

摘要: Molds, dies, and related tooling are used to shape many of the plastic metal components we use every day at home work. Traditional mold-making practices labor capital equipment intensive, involving multiple machining, benching heat treatment operations. Spray forming is an alternative method manufacture molds dies. The general concept atomize deposit droplets a alloy onto pattern form thick while imaging pattern’s shape, surface texture details. Unlike conventional this approach can be fabricate with micro-scale features. This paper describes research effort spray dies that image textures into polymers. goal study replicate give rise superhydrophobic behavior by mimicking structure highly water repellent biological materials such as lotus leaf. conditions leading high transfer fidelity features molded polymers will described. Improvements in repellency these was quantified measuring static contact angle on flat textured surfaces.