An Intelligent System for Improving Electric Discharge Machining Efficiency Using Artificial Neural Network and Adaptive Control of Debris Removal Operations

Electrical discharge machining (EDM) can effectively solve the shortcomings of traditional machining processes that cannot process special materials, so it is widely used on workpieces with strong hardness materials, such as titanium alloys and tool steels to produce various molds and dies. However, the operating procedures of EDM are quite complicated and low machining productivity. To improve machining efficiency, this study develops an intelligent system that adaptively controls debris removal operations instead of using preset debris removal parameters. A feature extraction method is proposed in this study to effectively identify the machining states from streaming images of the machining curve for evaluating the appropriate time of the debris removal operation. Then, the extracted features feed into the artificial neural network model to establish a debris removal predicted model. The preliminary experimental result shows that the established predicted model can achieve an accuracy of 96.93% for a testing dataset containing 750 machining curve images. To further verify the effectiveness of the proposed intelligent system in improving EDM efficiency, we integrate the debris removal predicted model into the EDM machine and test it on the manufacturing site. Compared with the preset debris removal parameter, the proposed intelligent system can save nearly 38.60% of machining time for the machining depth of 6.45mm under specific EDM conditions.