Aluminum
Our aluminium etching process is highly repeatable and consistent, offering a cost-effective and versatile manufacturing alternative to stamping, laser cutting and waterjet cutting.
HOW WE ETCH ALUMINIUM
Machining aluminium and its alloys has consistently presented challenges for both traditional processes and chemical etching. During etching, aluminium releases heat energy, leading to the formation of rough, granular edges. The material is also extremely reactive with certain chemical etchants, requiring meticulous control to ensure precise parts.
At XINKE, we have pioneered a robust, proprietary solution for etching aluminium and its alloys, producing cleaner edge profiles with enhanced accuracy and efficiency. Our chemical etching process also offers exceptional control and accuracy, ensuring optimal part performance.
Photo Etching Process
The photo etching process produces metal components that are both stress-free and burr-free compared to more traditional manufacturing methods – ensuring that your end product is as both accurate and precise to your drawings.
Metal Selection
The photo etching process produces metal components that are both stress-free and burr-free compared to more traditional manufacturing methods – ensuring that your end product is as both accurate and precise to your drawings.
Metal Cleaning Process
In order to ensure perfect parts every time, we need to clean the sheet metal to remove any impurities from the sheets surface before manufacturing your designs. This involves passing the metal sheets slowly through acid or alkaline solutions and rinsed prior to laminating, printing and developing.
Metal Cleaning
Metal cleaning involves passing the sheets slowly through conveyorised acid or alkaline solutions and rinsed clean prior to the lamination, printing and developing stages, depending on the sheet metal choice required.
Preparation - Lamination
Once cleaned the metal sheets are coated with a UV sensitive photo resist, which melts to sheet in preparation for the printing process.
Preparation - Printing
The printing process involves us taking your chosen profile design and applying it to a two sided top and bottom acetate photo film mask, that we then print your design onto the UV sensitive photo resist.
Preparation - Developing
Once the metal sheet is printed with your chosen design, we then need to develop the sheet. This process effectively washes away the fine lines of the profile we are cutting, leaving raw metal track lines ready for the etching process to work it’s magic very precisely.
Photo Chemical Etching
The etching process itself is an acid, usually ferric chloride, that effectively eats it’s way through the metal at a known rate to ensure precision and targeted only in the areas you wish to remove, such as the profile track lines or other holes and features such a mesh. The rest of the sheet is masked by the UV photo sensitive blue resist, to protect the metal from the etchant until the parts are complete. This can be a very useful in a manufacturing process as the design can be very complex or include tabs or half etch fold bend lines at no added cost as you simply print your design rather than needing expensive machining time. Following an on-line dimensional check, all that is then required, is for us to strip and remove the UV photo sensitive resist coating and the parts are ready for full QA Inspection.
QA Inspection
At Qualitetch we offer various levels of QA inspection depending on our customers needs, as we supply both major blue chip businesses all over the world as well as smaller local businesses and anywhere in-between, as the photo etching process is very versatile. We have various automated optical equipment to ensure you parts are accurately supplied to your drawings. We also offer levels of inspection including 100% inspection, PPAP levels, batch inspection, First article inspection (FAIR) and bespoke customer inspection as required.
Final Product
Once the parts are fully inspected and passed they are ready to be packed and sent to the customer, or for additional processes such as plating, forming, soldering, spot-welding, machining, EDM wire erosion, heat treatment or any other bespoke services required, such as assembly.