Experimental Investigations of EDM to Optimize Material Removal Rate & Surface Roughness through Taguchi's Technique of Design of Experiments

Electrical discharge machining (EDM) is one of the earliest non-traditional machining processes. EDM process is based on thermoelectric energy between the work piece and an electrode. A pulse discharge occurs in a small gap between the work piece and the electrode and removes the unwanted material from the parent metal through melting and vaporizing. The electrode and the work piece must have electrical conductivity in order to generate the spark. The parts of aerospace, automotive industry and surgical components can be finished by EDM. The adequate selection of manufacturing conditions is one of the most important aspects to take into consideration in the die-sinking electrical discharge machining (EDM) of conductive materials, as these conditions are the ones that are to determine such important characteristics as: surface roughness and material removal rate, among others. In this work, a study was carried out on the influence of the factors of Current (I), pulse time (ti) and varied material over the listed technological characteristics. Accordingly, mathematical models will be obtained using the Taguchi's technique of design of experiments (DOE) to select the optimal machining conditions for finishing stages. This will be done only using a small number of experiments.