Acoustic Monitoring of Stability and Productivity of Wire Electrical Discharge Machining (WEDM)

The field of application of electrical discharge (ED) processing is rapidly expanding that is associated with the rapidly increasing demand for parts made of hard-to-machine materials. In this paper, possibilities of increasing the stability and performance of the ED process via continuous monitoring of acoustic emission (AE) signals accompanying the electroerosion process have been studied. While studying Wire Electrical Discharge Machining (WEDM), we show that by monitoring the electroerosion parameters via AE signals, one can continuously obtain valuable information about the EDM processing that can be used to control the WEDM. In particular, we demonstrate that monitoring of AE signals can be used to prevent short circuits and breakages of electrodes, and to adjust the feed rate to the maximum performance.