Micro nozzle for Vacuum gripper manufactured via micro-EDM

Since traditional handling mechanisms have an unpredictable behavior at micro scale, micro-assembly is a bottleneck in the development of hybrid micro-systems, and the development of new approaches is strongly demanded. In this paper, a recent study of the fabrication of a ceramics vacuum micro-gripper to handle parts in the range of hundreds of microns (300-1000) is presented. Among the possible micro manufacturing processes, micro-EDM has been selected as proving to be a very competitive fabrication technology for the manufacturing of ultra miniature components and micro sized features. The influence of the process parameters on the machining performance of interest is firstly investigated; then, the experimental results on machining the micro gripper are presented, finally concluding remarks are given