Transitory electrochemical masking for precision jet processing techniques

Electrochemical jet processing techniques provide an efficient method for large area surface structuring and micro-milling, where the metallurgy of the near-surface is assured and not adversely affected by thermal loading. Here, doped electrolytes are specifically developed for jet techniques to exploit the Gaussian energy distribution as found in energy beam processes. This is achieved through the filtering of low energy at discrete points within the energy distribution curve. Two fundamental mechanisms of current filtering and refresh rate are proposed and investigated in order to underpin the performance enhancements found using this methodology.