j o u r n a l o f m a t e r i a l s p r o c e s s i n g t e c h n o l o g y 1 9 9 ( 2 0 0 8 ) 337–340

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Chemical etching of aluminium

O. Çakır
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Dicle University,
21280 Diyarbakir, Turkey

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Chemical etching is employed as micromachining manufacturing process to produce

Received 28 March 2007 micron-size components. The process applies a strong chemical etchant solution to remove
Received in revised form unwanted part in the workpiece material. It is basically a corrosion-controlled process.
12 July 2007 Chemical etching process has a long history and accepted one of the important nontra-
Accepted 8 August 2007 ditional machining processes during the last half century. The method is widely applied to
machine geometrically complex parts from thin and flat of any material. It is also used to
reduce weight of the workpiece materials. In this study, aluminium was machined by well-
Keywords: known chemical etchant, ferric chloride (FeCl3 ) at different etching temperature. The effects
Chemical etching of selected chemical etching parameters on depth of etch and surface finish quality were
Aluminium investigated. It was observed that FeCl3 was very useful chemical etching for aluminium
Depth of etch etching.
Surface quality © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction
Corrosion damages materials under normal circumstances,
but it can be applied as an efficient method for shaping mate-
rials that is named “etching”. The process is also called in
different names such as chemical etching (this term will be
used in this paper), chemical machining, chemical milling, wet
etching, etc. (ASM, 1989; Drozda and Wick, 1989; Çakır, 2001).
Chemical etching is a nontraditional machining process
in which material removal is carried out by using strong
chemical solution, called “etchant”. This is simply the “accel-
erated and controlled corrosion” process. The method is
recently employed as micromachining process in the produc-
tion. Chemical etching has a long history back to bc 2500, used
to produce jewelry from copper by citric acid in the Ancient
Egypt (Harris, 1976). It has been accepted one of the important
nontraditional machining method since 1950s. This machin-
ing process is widely used to machine thin and flat materials
producing geometrically complex and dimensionally accurate
components. It is also applied to reduce weight of the work-
piece materials such as aircraft wings (ASM, 1989; Drozda and
Wick, 1989; Çakır, 2001; Harris, 1976; Dini, 1984; McCallion,
1987).
Aluminium has a wide engineering application as a mate-
rial in aircraft, aerospace, automotive industries where weight
is probably the most important factor. The first chemical etch-
ings of aluminium were mainly carried out for decorative
purposes. Chemical etching of aluminium was industrially
completed by M.C. Sanz from North Aviation Inc. in 1956; he
took the US patent (Patent no.: 2,739,047) and named the pro-
cess “chemical milling” or in short “chem-mill” (Sanz, 1956).
Later industrial applications have been carried out by other
aircraft manufacturers (Snyder and Rosenberg, 1961; Tershin
and Howells, 1967; Ashcraft, 1969; Gross, 1986; Ranieri and
Patel, 1996; Denns, 1996).
Various studies have been reported over chemical etching
of aluminium (Win and Mori, 1980; Chattergee and Thomas,
1976; Kape, 1977; Gerlagh and Baeyens, 1975; Chambers, 2000).
It has been noticed that the selection of efficient etchant
in chemical etching of any material is probably the most
important parameter. The effective chemical etchant would
produce a higher etch rate and smooth surface finish. It was

E-mail address: ocakir@dicle.edu.tr.

0924-0136/$ – see front matter © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.jmatprotec.2007.08.012
338 j o u r n a l o f m a t e r i a l s p r o c e s s i n g t e c h n o l o g y 1 9 9 ( 2 0 0 8 ) 337–340

noticed that these studies mainly used alkaline-based chemi-

cal solutions, e.g., sodium hydroxide. The application of other
etchants has not been investigated such as ferric chloride
(FeCl3 ). Therefore, the present study would provide impor-
tant scientific information about the aluminium etching with
FeCl3 . Moreover, these studies have not studied environmental
effect of aluminium chemical etching process. Therefore, it is
significant to provide information about the environmentally
friendly chemical etching of aluminium process.
New etchants have been studied for various engineering
materials and FeCl3 turn out the most attractive chemical
etchant for most of the engineering materials etching such
as steels, aluminium and its alloys, copper and its alloys, etc.
It is widely used and became a universal etchant in etching
processes. It is cheap and easy to control during etching pro-
cess as well as various etchant regeneration systems for used
FeCl3 solution can be accessible from industrial point of view
(Allen, 1986; Allen and Almond, 2004; Tehrani and Imanian,
2004; Allen and Jeffries, 2006).
This present paper aimed to study chemical etching of alu-
minium by using concentration of 1.25 mol FeCl3 at different
etching temperatures. The effects of etching parameters on
Fig. 1 – Experimental set-up of aluminium beaker etching.
depth of etch and surface roughness have been examined.
The importance of the study is the application of FeCl3 in
aluminium etching obtaining experimental result and then
The selected etching temperatures were 20, 30, 40 and
discusses these results.
50 ± 2 ◦ C. Double sided etching process was carried out for
20 min in total. Each depth of etch and surface roughness
2. Experimental procedures measurements were completed after 5 min intervals. The
measurement of depth of etch was carried out by Mitutoyo
The experimental study of chemical etching of aluminium outside micrometer (deviation was ±0.001) and surface rough-
was carried out in beaker, using immersion etching method. ness measured by Taylor-Hobson Surtronic 3+. The surface
The selected material was EN AW-7075, its chemical compo- measurement filter of this equipment was 2CR type. The cut-
sition was given in Table 1. The hardness of the material was off length was taken as the maximum value as 2.5 mm. Stylus
175–200 HB. The thickness of specimen was 1 mm and cut at type was diamond with 5 ␮m radius. For each experiment,
10 mm × 60 mm dimensions. three specimens were chemically etched and three measure-
The experimental study of chemical etching is based on ments were taken from each specimen.
two steps, cleaning and etching. The cleaning step consists of
removing grease, oil, heavy oxides and other contaminations
from the surface of the specimen to be subjected to chemi-
3. Experimental results and discussion
cal etching. The reason for such removal of these materials is
that these contaminations will interfere with a uniform chem- The chemical reaction of aluminium (Al) etching with FeCl3
ical etching operation from the attack of chemical etchant can be written as follows:
solution employed. Therefore, the specimens were cleaned in
3FeCl3 + Al → 3FeCl2 + AlCl3
ultrasonic cleaning machine by using Actoclean Pulver pow-
der mixed with distilled water chemical cleaning solution to The chemical etching of aluminium with FeCl3 etchant is
remove unwanted contaminations from workpiece material. mainly completed at three steps:
The cleaning process was completed at 30 ◦ C for 30 min.
For the second step of the chemical etching of aluminium, a. FeCl3 attacks aluminium;
the selected etchant (FeCl3 ) was prepared at 1.25 mol and b. Etchant contacts material surface and electron transfer
poured into beaker that was put into water jacket to con- starts;
trol etching temperature. The experimental set-up of beaker c. Corroded Fe ions and elements of etched materials spread
etching method was given in Fig. 1. into etchant.

Table 1 – Chemical composition of EN AW-7075 aluminium

Chemical elements (%)

Al Si Fe Cu Mn Mg Cr Zn Ti Others

96 0.4 0.5 1.2–2.0 0.3 2.1–2.9 0.18–0.28 5.1–6.1 0.2 0.05

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Fig. 4 – Surface roughness examination of aluminium

Fig. 2 – Examination of depth of etch.
etching.

Depth of etch parameter presents an influence of etching

process in the chemical etching of any material. This param-
eter also gives etch rate value of the chemical etching of
aluminium. The depth of etch was examined due to etching
time. It was observed that the depth of etch increased with
etching process continued (Fig. 2). After 5 min etching, etch-
ing process of aluminium produced bubbles in the etchant.
During each interval for measurements, some smuts on the
etched surface have been observed. Therefore, the smuts on
the etched aluminium surface were washed for easy measure-
ments.
The influence of etching temperature on depth of etch was
positive, depth of etch increased when higher etching temper-
ature was used. The highest depth of etch obtained at 50 ◦ C,
Fig. 5 – Effect of etching temperature on surface roughness.
lower etching temperatures produced less depth of etch val-
ues. This is due to chemical activation of the etchant at high
temperature; the etchant becomes more active for etching.
These results were shown in Fig. 3. by etching time and etching temperature. Etching time was
Surface roughness presents the effectiveness of the chem- important; longer etching period produced a constant etch-
ical etching process when it is used for weight reduction ing process in case of aluminium etching, because chemical
purpose. The investigation of surface roughness in the chemi- etching was not properly occurred in the first part of etching
cal etching of aluminium was carried out and the results were process (first 5 min etching). After this period, the etching of
given in Fig. 4. It was observed that surface quality changed aluminium was more stable.
Etching temperature was also an influential factor on
surface finish quality. It was noticed that higher etching tem-
perature generally increases surface roughness. The trend
of surface roughness was that higher etching temperature
produced poor surface quality (Fig. 5). The lowest surface
roughness was obtained at 20◦ C etching temperature and the
highest was at 50 ◦ C.

4. Conclusion

The experimental investigation of chemical etching of EN AW-

7075 aluminium was completed by using concentration of
1.25 mol FeCl3 etchant at various etching temperatures. The
important conclusions were observed as follow:

a. FeCl3 is very suitable etchant for aluminium etching. The

chemical reaction is simple, that makes the process easy to
Fig. 3 – Effect of etching temperature on depth of etch (after control. This result is important in case of weight reduction
20 min etching time). from the workpiece material.
340 j o u r n a l o f m a t e r i a l s p r o c e s s i n g t e c h n o l o g y 1 9 9 ( 2 0 0 8 ) 337–340
b. Depth of etch is one of important etching outputs in chem-
ical etching of any material. It was affected by etching time
and etching temperature. Longer etching process produced
a higher depth of etch. Higher etching temperatures pro-
vided higher depth of etch values.
c. Surface finish quality was mainly affected by etching tem-
perature. The influence of etching temperature was not
clear, because the best surface quality was obtained at
either 40 or 20 ◦ C of etching temperature. Other temper-
atures produced higher surface roughness. It was also
observed that etching period should be kept longer to make
the etching more stable.
d. As a result, high etching temperature should be selected
for aiming higher depth of etch and a better surface fin-
ish quality. This combination of etching parameters would
make the material removal rate higher.
This study has also showed further research opportunities
in the chemical etching of aluminium such as investigat-
ing various etchant concentrations on etching parameters,
some chemical additives to main etchant and examining other
possible etchants. Moreover, environmentally acceptable alu-
minium etching process should be investigated including
economical regeneration of waste etchant and recovery of etch
material.
Acknowledgments
Author is grateful to Prof. Dr. Tahsin Kılıçoğlu and Assoc. Prof.
Dr. Hamdi Temel (Dicle University, Diyarbakir) for providing
laboratory facilities and scientific help.
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