Corrosion and Fatigue Testing of Microsized 304 Stainless Steel Beams Fabricated by Femtosecond Laser

The 304 stainless steel (SS) microcantilever specimens with dimensions of 30 mu m x 30 mu m x 50 mu m (thickness x width x length) were fabricated by femtosecond (fs) laser. The microsized cantilevers of good quality with structure and dimensions according commendably with that of the designed cantilever were obtained. The result shows that fs laser micromachining is a promising method for directly fabricating metallic microcomponents. Corrosion and fatigue properties of microsized specimens were carried out on the microsized 304 SS cantilever beams by a newly developed fatigue testing machine. The results show that the microsized 304 SS specimens appear to have an improved resistance towards localized corrosion compared to ordinary-sized 304 SS specimens after the static corrosion testing. The testing result shows that the presence of corrosive solution reduces the fatigue lifetime of the 304 SS specimen by a factor of 10-100. The maximum bending loads measured by fatigue testing machine decrease rapidly at the terminal stage of environment assisted fatigue testing. Corrosion fracture first occurred at the range of notch with a higher tensile bending stress, and exhibited clear evidence of trans-columnar fracture detected by SEM (scanning electron microscopy).