Experimental Study of Micro Abrasive Tool Making by Electroplating

Accurate and precise micro abrasive tools are essential for the micromachining of highly complex features in a wide variety of engineering materials including metals and ceramics. With existing abrasive coating techniques such as sol-gel method, chemical vapor deposition, physical vapor deposition, and composite electroforming, it is difficult to control the aggregation tendency of abrasive grains. This work evaluates the feasibility of implementing electroplating principles to fabricate a micro abrasive tool by co-deposition of nickel and micro diamond powder over a tungsten substrate. In this work, a tungsten rod of diameter 500 μm was deposited with 2–4 μm diamond abrasive grains using nickel as a binder. Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) and energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX) studies reveal that more uniform coating is obtained with multilayer coating of micro diamond abrasive by electroplating. The coating process mechanism is discussed.