Performance of electrical discharge machining using aluminium powder suspended distilled water

Authors: KHALID HUSSAIN SYED, KUPPAN PALANIYANDI

Abstract: This paper presents the experimental investigations on addition of aluminium metal powder to dielectric fluid in electric discharge machining (EDM). As more emphasis is given nowadays to the green manufacturing concept, the present investigation uses distilled water mixed with aluminium powder as dielectric fluid instead of conventional hydrocarbon-based oils. The workpiece and electrode materials chosen for the investigation are W300 die-steel and electrolytic copper, respectively. Taguchi design of experiments is used to conduct experiments by varying the parameters peak current, pulse on-time, concentration of the powder, and polarity. The process performance is measured in terms of material removal rate (MRR), electrode wear ratio (EWR), average surface roughness (Ra), and white layer thickness (WLT). The experimental results indicate that the polarity significantly affects the machining performance. Signal-to-noise (S/N) ratio and the analysis of variance (ANOVA) are employed to find the optimal levels for the process parameters to achieve maximum MRR, low EWR, Ra, and WLT values.

Keywords: Aluminium powder, die-steel, distilled water, powder mixed EDM, Taguchi method

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