Development of a hybrid process for manufacturing surgical-grade knife blade cutting edges from bulk metallic glass

The demand for precision surgical knives is enormous. Currently, diamond knives have been the preferred choice among surgeons for use in precision surgeries, owing to the extreme hardness of diamond and the sharpness that can be achieved in single crystal diamond blades, but material and processing costs are high. Bulk metallic glass (BMG) has the potential to be an economically-viable material of similar performance for use in precision surgical knives. To this end, a novel hybrid manufacturing process integrating thermally-assisted micromolding and micro-drawing has been developed for producing BMG surgical-grade knife blade cutting edges with edge radii