Preparation of zirconia ceramic microtool for cell tissue separation by combining corrosion thinning and focused ion beam (FIB) technology

The material removal of micro-nano-machining to prepare microtool is too large, and the material needs to be pre-treated. In this paper, the micro removal processing of zirconia material was carried out by corrosion method, and the effects of corrosive liquid concentration, corrosion temperature and corrosion duration on the efficiency of corrosion processing and the degree of material damage were studied and the material removal mechanism was investigated. The results showed that the material removal increased with the increase of corrosion duration at 50% corrosion solution concentration and 200 °C; the average removal was about 38 μm/h. At the same corrosion duration and corrosion temperature, the removal efficiency of the material increased and then levelled off with the increase of corrosion solution concentration, and remained unchanged after 40% concentration. Microstructures with good taper were obtained at 30% etchant concentration and 7 h etching duration. The material corrosion products and the crystalline changes of zirconia after corrosion were characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The results show that during the corrosion process, the corrosive solution mainly corrodes the intergranular bonding phase, leading to the formation of lamellar exfoliation. Microtool with nanoscale edges were prepared using focused ion beam (FIB) technology with machining parameters of 30 KeV, 69 nA, 30 KeV, 2.5 nA and 5 KeV, 0.23 nA, respectively. The results of biocompatibility tests showed that the microtool had no significant effect on cell growth. The cell tissue separation experiments showed that the microtool could effectively separate the cell tissues.