Study of water assisted dry wire-cut electrical discharge machining

Abstract

In the modern manufacturing industries, one of the challenges is to reduce the environmental impacts by the machining processes. In this article, the minimum quantity of tap water mixed with compressed air is used as a dielectric fluid in wire-cut electrical discharge machining (WEDM) which promotes the green manufacturing environment. Four input process parameters have been considered such as the pulse width (PW), discharge current (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">I</i>), air inlet pressure (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">P</i>) and flow rate (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">F</i>) of mixing water to study the parametric effects on the material removal rate (MRR) and surface roughness (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">R</i>_a). High speed steel (HSS) is used as a work material which is one of the key materials to manufacture the cutting tools of the conventional machining process. Central composite design (CCD) of response surface methodology (RSM) has been used to conduct the design of experiments and to develop the regression models for the output parameters. It was observed from response surface analysis that PW, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">I</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">F</i> are the significant process parameters and optimum responses (maximum MRR and minimum <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">R</i>_a) have been achieved at the moderate air pressure (5 bar).