Xray machining - make truly any homogeneous object, including to very high accuracy?

I have a background in cnc machining, so I am familiar with its limitations, and I am seriously thinking about what we might see next, somewhere between here and, frankly, something like atomically precise manufacturing.

I think Shape deposition modeling has potential, but there are some advantages in terms of material strength and other properties and accuracy that carving something out of a solid block really maximizes.

There is a system I remember seeing that used a pulsed laser to vaporize glass from within a glass block, to carve out micro sized objects. Is just a bit slow, otherwise it could be scaled up.. There is also the machines used for making so called bubble grams, which fracture the glass, allowing 3d images of any desired shape.

I seriously wonder about using highly focused xrays. They would not get absorbed much. not exactly at the point of focus, but as long as it removes material within the block without needing to get the other material out of the way first, the rest is a matter of optimisation.

The of thing that might make it work is that xrays can be produced at an extremely.tiny point, and therefore.focused to an extremely tiny point. The production area can be where a tightly focussed electron beam (or the tip of a cone rather) strollers a rotating water cooled copper disk. Very very high power density,

The precision of the mirror and the mechanical motion of the rotating disk is the limiting factor in the effective spot size, I guess.


The mirror could be the dialectric type, although they are a expensive idk how expensive they ultimately need to be, if they are just layers of deposited material on a substrate, of highly precise thickness..

An elliptical mirror could be used to snag more of the xray power.

If a kilowatt of xrays is producedhundred watts can be focused to a volume 0.5 microns in diameter, and perhaps 1 percent is absorbed, I wonder if that would be enough. or might not be. The use of a pulsed xray system might get somewhere, if you could produce a peak of a megawatt but an average of a kilowatt, maybe that could do it.

You only need to vaporize the surface of the geometry you want to create, so a very small volume.. Then chop apart any interior volumes so they can be removed, maybe, but even that could be done through other means most of the time, the main really critical thing is too get those surfaces carved, highly accurately and with no limitations on geometry.

Unlike printing, the blocks of materials with the desired material properties already imbued, and stress free, can be used, and also e.g. power metallirgy alloys which cannot be melted and resolidified without ruining them.

of course rich a system would have to be located underground not that deeply though, or just kept well away from everything, but electron welding equipment for instance, has the same problem and that is widely used, so it is by no means a deal breaker.

So?

... there are no easy to handle optics or focussing methodes for X-rays - they'll need either extrem dense materials, or surface effects using Bragg-angles, what could be done with hollow fibres, but won't give fine focussing.

Read for the LIGA process, to see, what's actually doable with X-rays, etching and galvanics.

Better usable for "micro-machining" are Excimer lasers with high energy UV flashing - did some micro-etching of polymers and gold with lateral accuracies down to 1micron by "cold" evaporating some ten nanometers per flash ...

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Viktor
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