An investigation on deformation-based surface texturing

Surface textures have various applications, such as friction/wear reduction and light absorbing enhancement. Deformation-based surface texturing has the potential of economically creating micro-scale surface textures over a large surface area. A novel desktop surface texturing system is proposed for efficiently and economically fabricating microchannels on the surface of thin sheet material for microfluid and friction/wear reduction applications. Both the experimental and numerical studies were employed to analyze the problems of the flatness of the textured sheet, the uniform of the channel depth and pile-ups built up during the surface texturing process. The results demonstrated a clear relationship between relative velocity of the upper and lower rolls and the flatness of the textured sheet and the final profile of the microchannels.