Experimental investigation of microdrilling operation of printed circuit board

Abstract

In this present age the application of micromachining operations continues to grow. These operations are required to fabricate the products required for sectors like medical science, automobile industries and electronics manufacturing etc. which deals with miniature trends. Micro drilling process is one of the micromachining process which is used to drill micro holes not only in micro products but also in relatively larger work pieces which require ultra-small features which can be accomplished only by micromachining process. Small highly accurate holes are a common requirement across various industries and applications. In this paper, the investigation of micro drilling on copper coated printed circuit board (PCB) has been reported. Taguchi methodology has been used to plan the experiments and by using grey rational grades the optimum process parameters have been calculated. The process parameters considered in this case are spindle speed and feed rate. The torque, thrust force, time of machining and circularity has been measured. An attempt to calculate the influence of these parameters on the response variables has been made in order to plan an economically feasible machining operation. The optimum values for the process parameters have been identified by using signal to noise ratio analysis of grey relational co-efficients.