Reliability improvement of a powder blasting process for micro-machining applications

The improvement on an existing powder blasting machine is presented and characterised in this paper. The original prototype suffered from irregular powder clogging during real time utilisation, especially with very fine particles. Moreover, the fluctuations of the flow of particle generated were not ideal for micro-machining purposes. We demonstrate that the re-engineering of the original reservoir used with freshly dried powder brings reliability and more consistency in the powder flow rate. This improvement is easy to implement in the original design and does not need to re-engineer the entire machine. For this study, very fine powder with average particle diameter of 9 μm was used.