Micro-Scaled Formed Tubular Structures and Their Applications

The metallic tubular micro-structures are widely used in a broad range of industrial products. The demand of these structures is dramatically increasing, and the micro-scaled forming technologies present tremendous advantages in industrial manufacturing of microtubes. Nevertheless, some issues including size effect, quality improvement and feasible miniaturization of forming tools are needed carefully handled. This article focuses on the newly developed microforming processes for tubular structures including multi-pass tube drawing, dieless tube drawing, micro-scaled hydroforming and energy fields assisted microforming of difficult-to-deform tube. In addition, the potential applications of microformed tubular structures in biomedicine, heat transfer and consumer electronics are reviewed.