Novel fabrication process of micro components by viscous flowing of iron based metallic glassy monodispersed particles

Since Fe based metallic glasses have many attractive properties, i.e. high mechanical strength, high wear resistance, excellent soft magnetic properties, they've been expected to be utilized as raw materials for micro components. However, there are some difficulties and limitations in processing the Fe based metallic glass supercooled liquid into a final product due to its low thermal stability. Thus, the fabrication of Fe based metallic glassy micro components have yet to be achieved so far. In this work, we focused on fabricating metallic glassy micro components by using a novel microfabrication process which was previously proposed by our group. In the process, single spherical metallic glassy particle with several hundred micrometers in diameter was used as a raw material. A micro viscous flow processing was carried out using two types of dies with different shape, i.e. one is prism shape and another one is gear shape. In our study, two kinds of metallic glassy particles with different composition of [(Fe_0.5Co_0.5)_0.75Si_0.05B_0.2]₉₆Nb₄ and Pd_42.5Cu₃₀Ni_7.5P₂₀, whose glass forming ability and thermal stability are different from each other, were used to demonstrate the applicability of the process. The results showed that the [(Fe_0.5Co_0.5)_0.75Si_0.05B_0.2]₉₆Nb₄ metallic glassy micro components with fully amorphous structure was successfully fabricated for the first time and Pd_42.5Cu₃₀Ni_7.5P₂₀ micro components was also fabricated by means of our proposed microfabrication process.