Selecting Manufacturing Processes

An extensive and continuously expanding variety of manufacturing processes are used to produce parts, and there is usually more than one method of manufacturing a part from a given material. The broad categories of processing methods are as follows:

(A) Casting: Expendable mold and permanent mold.

(B) Forming and shaping: Rolling, forging, extrusion, drawing, sheet forming, powder metallurgy, and molding.

(C) Machining: Turning, boring, drilling, milling, planing, shaping, broaching, and grinding, ultrasonic machining; chemical, electrical, and electrochemical machining; and high-energy-beam machining; this category also includes micromachining for producing ultraprecision parts.

(D) Joining: Welding, brazing, soldering, diffusion bonding, adhesive bonding, and mechanical joining.

(E) Finishing: Honing, lapping, polishing, burnishing, deburring, surface treating, coating, and plating.

(F) Nanofabrication: It is the most advanced technology and is capable of producing parts with dimensions at the nano level(one billionth); it typically involves processes such as etching techniques, electron-beams, and laser-beams. Present applications are in the fabrication of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) and extending to nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS), which operate on the same scale as biological molecules.