Modeling and control of a hot micro-embossing machine

As the market for polymer micro- and nano-devices expands there is an ever-present need for a manufacturing standard to mass produce these parts. A number of techniques for fabricating these devices are soft lithography, micro-injection molding, and micro-embossing. Micro-embossing shows great promise in terms of versatility in creating various structures, but its shortcoming is a relatively long cycle time. Therefore, it is imperative to find efficient ways of heating and cooling in addition to having good control of critical processing parameters. This thesis will address the modeling and control of a hot micro-embossing system which utilizes oil as the heating and cooling medium. There were three thermal requirements addressed for the system: steady state temperatures within 1 C, fast as possible heating and cooling cycles, and being robust to various embossing and de-embossing processing temperatures. A model of the major thermal components in the system was developed and correlated well with experimental data. It was confirmed with simulation and experimentation that a lower flow rate achieved faster heating and a higher flow rate produced faster cooling. In order to address the steady state temperature requirement a variable gain PI controller was implemented.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2006

Author dc:creator

• Shoji, Grant T. (Grant Tatsuo)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• David E. Hardt.

• Mechanical Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/35621

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/35621