Study on surface quality and mechanical properties of micro-milling WE43 magnesium alloy cardiovascular stent

Traditional laser processing technique is mainly applied for cardiovascular stent manufacture, especially for materials with high mechanical properties and high melting point, while it usually produces problems such as material ablation and defects during finish machining process. Magnesium alloy, as material candidate for bioresorbable cardiovascular stent, has low melting and ignition point, high oxidizability property. Laser processing technique scarcely meets the requirements of high surface quality of magnesium alloy cardiovascular stents, this paper firstly develops a five-axis micro-milling technique to fabricate magnesium alloy cardiovascular stents. Milling orthogonal test was carried out to obtain the optimal finish machining parameters, and then a novel stent machining process was established. The processed stent has an inner diameter of 1.5 mm, a thickness of 80 μm and a length of 8 mm with a U-bend width of 100 μm and a link strut width of 70 μm, and the optimal finish processing parameters was set up with the main spindle speed of 30,000 rpm, feed speed 200 mm/min, cutting width 50 μm and cutting depth 40 μm. The dimensional accuracy and surface topography of the magnesium alloy stent were measured and characterized, and results showed that the dimensional accuracy was within 0.01 mm, and the machined stent achieved better surface quality without obvious processing defects such as pits, grooves and pores while comparing with the stent under original processing parameters. In order to evaluate the radial support performance of the stent, the radial compression and expansion experiments and simulations were conducted, respectively. Results showed that the maximum diameter error in the experiment and simulation was 13.35 %, and the radial recoiling error was 16.79 %. This work provides a potential stent manufacture technique in the development and clinical application of bioresorbable magnesium alloy stent.