An Experimental and Theoretical Investigation on the Micro Drilling of PMMA Samples

Laser drilling on Poly Methyl Methacrylate (PMMA) samples has several uses in a variety of industries including sensors, microelectronics and medical devices. A continuous CO2 laser is utilized for micro-drilling PMMA samples. The design of experiments using Box Behnken Design (BBD) were applied to examine the impact of laser factors, such as power, exposure time, and focal plane position on the micro-drilling process to analyze the results using the statistical technique (ANOVA). Simulation of the drilling mechanism's temperature distribution was achieved by the COMSOL multi-physics software to conduct virtual experiments. This simulation accuracy was fit to predict the holes' geometry and offered results that favorably match with the experimental outputs. The numerical optimization was used to predict the ideal hole quality, whereby the ideal hole for PMMA sheet resulted is a full hole of 1mm, with a suitable diameter of 360µm, and a small HAZ of 60 µm.