Fabrication of die-sinking electrical discharge machine for machining of holes on copper plate

Abstract

Electrical Discharge Machining has been playing an important role in manufacturing sector especially industries like aerospace, ordinance, automobile, general engineering, etc. Electrical Discharge Machining (EDM) is one of the important non-traditional machining processes which is used for machining of conductive and semi conductive materials and also difficult to machine materials like super alloys and composites materials. However, selection of process parameters for obtaining higher cutting efficiency or accuracy in EDM is still not fully solved, even with the most updated EDM machine. An attempt is made in the present work to develop a prototype of EDM consisting of different units namely, dielectric filtering and recirculation unit, pulse generation and control unit and tool-feed control unit. They describe the utilization of various units and their components of proto-type EDM. Orthogonal Array, Taguchi Experimental design is developed for experimentation. The process parameters such as voltage, duty cycle and sensor value are by considered during machining. The experiments are carried-out to produce holes on copper plate using EDM Machine. The experimental results are analyzed and the optimal combinations of influential parameters are determined using Grey Taguchi Analysis. The optimum size of hole is obtained as 2.030 mm, at 40V and 0% Duty Cycle. The analysis is carried-out using Mini TAB and GRA.