Chemical etching of aluminium

Chemical etching is employed as micromachining manufacturing process to produce micron-size components. The process applies a strong chemical etchant solution to remove unwanted part in the workpiece material. It is basically a corrosion-controlled process. Chemical etching process has a long history and accepted one of the important nontraditional machining processes during the last half century. The method is widely applied to machine geometrically complex parts from thin and flat of any material. It is also used to reduce weight of the workpiece materials. In this study, aluminium was machined by well-known chemical etchant, ferric chloride (FeCl3) at different etching temperature. The effects of selected chemical etching parameters on depth of etch and surface finish quality were investigated. It was observed that FeCl3 was very useful chemical etching for aluminium etching.