There is a constant need to produce cheaper and faster tooling with micro and nanostructured for high-rate polymer manufacturing processes, such as hot embossing and injection molding. This work presents a novel direct printing approach for producing durable metal tooling with structured surfaces. The investigation of printing pastes produced from commercially-available materials - as well as custom pastes in which the binders, additives, and metal particles were varied – provided pastes with optimized compositions. An evaluation of printing parameters, i.e., flow rate of the paste, the diameter and gap for the printing tip, and printing speed, permitted control of feature dimensions. This novel tooling survived 5000 injection molding cycles without significant changes in feature dimensions. The tooling is most suited for producing microfluidic devices and other parts with micro and nanostructured surfaces.
