Analysis of the Influence of EDM Parameters on Material Removal Rate and Electrode Wear Ratio of Al-Cu

Abstract

The objective of this work is to determine the optimal setting of the process parameters on the electro-discharge machining (EDM), The Aluminium copper cast alloy were used as a work piece and pure copper were used as the electrode. The experiments were done on an FORM 2-LC machine by using Taguchi methodology. The Taguchi method is used to formulate the experimental layout and analyze the effect of each parameter on the machining characteristics, and to predict the optimal choice for each EDM parameter such as polarity, Pulse-on time, discharge currant, and duty factor. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) used F-test to investigate which process parameters significantly affect the performance characteristics and the percent contribution of these parameters on material removal rate (MRR) and electrode ware ratio (EWR). In general, it is found that the discharge currant significantly affects the MRR, while the Pulse-on time mainly affects the EWR.