Design for micro milling guidelines

Miniaturisation of parts is emerging as an important approach to satisfy modern industrial and customer needs. Micro milling is one of the basic micromachining technologies used toproduce miniaturised components. It differs from conventional machining in that the handling and machining of very small features generates various problems. As a consequence, designers need to consider such problems during design to make micromilling more feasible. More emphasis thus needs to be placed on deriving design know-how from the other product life-phases. This paper reports the work undertaken by the Department of Manufacturing within the University of Malta to generate a set of Design for Micromilling (DFμM) guidelines that can contribute to the development to intelligent CAD for this domain.peer-reviewe