Comparative study of material removal rate and tool wear rate of copper and aluminium on die sinking EDM

Abstract

The electrical discharge machining (EDM) is one of non - conventional machining process where the erosion of the work piece take place based on the thermal energy between the electrode and the work piece. Due to the widely used and its availability, copper and aluminium was used in this study. These two materials was machined using die sinking EDM to study the characteristics of each material using copper electrode. Few research has been conducted to study copper electrode to machined copper work piece and this was considered as a challenge in this research. More heat was generated and more time consumed was the reason behind machining small depth in this research. The important factors such as discharge current, voltage, pulse on time and pulse off time monitored and recorded to know how these factors effect on the Material Removal Rate (MRR) and Tool Wear Ratio (TWR) of the copper and aluminium work piece material. The experiments conducted under the designed full factorial procedure where pulse on-time and pulse current are used as the input parameters. It was found that material MRR increases with increase in current and pulse duration, but MRR is higher during machining of aluminum than that of copper. In term of TWR it is found that the TWR resulting of machining copper is lower than aluminium.