NON-TRADITIONAL MACHINING PROCESS SELECTION - AN INTEGRATED APPROACH

With a large demand intended for the use of harder and difficult to machine materials like titanium, Inconel, high-strength temperature resistant (HSTR) alloys etc. coupled with the need for high accuracy and desired surface finish have lead us to the situation where we find ourselves entangled in a large pool of Non-Traditional machining (NTM) processes. As such selecting a particular NTM process turns out to be a complicated job for a specific task. Meticulous selection of a NTM process involves a lot of criteria and hence multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) method is used to solve such problems. For the aid of decision maker such that the process of selection gets simplified an integrated method of fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) with Quality function deployment (QFD) has been implemented for finding the significance of different technical requirements on a relative basis. Subsequently grey relational analysis (GRA) has been implemented for ranking out the alternatives and it was found that Electrochemical machining (ECM) overrules other NTM processes. A problem already existing in the literature has been picked up for the numerical illustration. The results obtained in the present research study are comparable with the existing literature and sensitivity analysis indicates the robustness of the proposed model.