Plasma-nitriding assisted micro-texturing into stainless steel molds

¹ Department of Engineering and Design, Shibaura Institute of Technology, 108-8548 Tokyo, Japan
² R & D Center, Sanko-Light Industry, Co. Ltd. 211-0053 Kawasaki, Japan

^a Corresponding author: e-mail: taizawa@sic.shibaura-it.ac.jp

Abstract

Micro-texturing has grown up to be one of the most promising procedures. This related application required for large-area, fine micro-texturing onto the stainless steel mold materials. A new method other than laser-machining, micro-milling or micro-EDM was awaited for further advancement of this micro-texturing. In the present paper, a plasma nitriding assisted micro-texturing was developed to make various kinds of micro-patterns onto the martensitic stainless steels. First, original patterns were printed onto the surface of substrate by using the ink-jet printer. Then, the masked substrate was subjected to high density plasma nitriding; the un-masked surfaces were nitrided to have higher hardness. This nitrided substrate was further treated by sand-blasting to selectively dig the soft, masked surfaces. Finally, the micro-patterned martensitic stainless steel substrate was fabricated as a mold to duplicate these micro-patterns onto the work materials. The spatial resolution and depth profile controllability of this plasma nitriding assisted micro-texturing was investigated for variety of initial micro-patterns. The original size and dimension of initial micro-patterns were precisely compared with the three dimensional geometry of micro-textures after blasting treatment. The plastic cover case for smart cellular phones was employed to demonstrate how useful this processing is in practice.