Development of Rotary Laser Dieless Drawing Apparatus for Metal Microtubes

Abstract

We develop new drawing technologies of rotary laser dieless drawing for the fabrication of micro-tubes without the need for tools such as dies, plugs and mandrels. A rotary laser dieless drawing apparatus with local heating using a laser irradiated from one direction as the heating source has been focused on for the fabrication of micro-tubes. In this study, a dieless drawing with a semiconductor laser setup with power of 30W is designed and developed. A workpieces was rotated about a tensile axis by rotary stage with chucks for circumferential uniform temperature distribution. A tube of stainless steel SUS304, with an outer diameter of 0.5mm and thickness of 0.13mm is used in the experiments. In this experiment, we verify the effectiveness of the developed rotary laser dieless drawing apparatus.