Experimental Investigation of the Elliptic Vibration Shape and Frequency on the Electrochemical Micromachining

This paper introduces a novel elliptic vibration assisted wire electrochemical micromachining (WEMM) method, and the impact of vibration shape and vibration frequency on the machining quality is explored. A piezoelectric driven flexible mechanism is applied to generate elliptical trajectory on the cathode, the average value and root mean square error of the slit width are used to assess the machining quality. According to the experimental results, the elliptic vibration assisted WEMM reduce the machining width more effective than the one-dimensional vibration, but the root mean square error of the slit width is affected greatly by the vibration shape and frequency. Based on the experimental results, the vibration parameters are optimized as vibration frequency 10 Hz and phase difference 45° of controlling signals.