Chemical etching is a new technology in the manufacturing industry that uses temperature regulated baths of etching chemicals to remove materials selectively to manufacture metal parts of any desired shape. It’s a more cost-efficient manufacturing technique as compared to others. This technique doesn’t need for deburring, has more design flexibility, and it takes the shortest lead time possible. Regardless of industrial or prototyping production, it turns out as the best option for manufacturing precision metal parts.
This is done under a series of steps that include lamination, cleaning, developing, stripping, exposing, and etching. After all these steps are done, a rigorous inspection is carried out automatically to all produced components.
A substrate is a sheet of particular desired material that gets laminated first using a light-sensitive resist layer. This is a photo resist that is afterward exposed selectively to UV light and later developed to come out with a positive image of a particular product. To obtain a metallic product, patterned substrates are exposed directly to an etching solution allowing selective removal of all unprotected parts from what is worked on. The entire process is carried out at controlled operating conditions so that the best results are achieved at the end.
Benefits of this technology
This is your right option if you need to create complex, high precision multi-layer metal parts. The tolerance percentage on the etched features lies at about +/- 10%. Let’s look at an example to this, when a metal part of let’s say 200 μm is etched, the total expected deviation can go to something around 20 μm. This is the best manufacturing technology, especially when sharp edges, profiled edges, round and straight edges are desired.
This is a new technology that provides out extremely competitive options from large scale to prototype productions as compared to the old machining techniques like stamping, CNC machining, laser cutting, among others. The reason this is said is due to the scalability and flexible tooling nature of the method. In a matter of days, you will be expecting rapid prototypes from your drawings produced.
This is a non-traditional technology that serves several industries, and it’s the best at creating components that can be used in defense, industrial, and medical fields. With its numerous advantages, it turns to be not only more efficient over other existing methods but also more economical. Chemical etching is a technology that should be looked at in this modern era.