EFFECT OF ELECTRICAL PROCESS PARAMETERS OF ELECTRIC DISCHARGE MACHINE (EDM) ON SURFACE ROUGHNESS AND MATERIAL REMOVAL RATE FOR EN 8 ALLOY STEEL

In today's time, Non Traditional Machining is best suited for machining exotic engineering metallic materials, composite materials and high tech ceramics having good mechanical properties and thermal characteristics as well as sufficient electrical conductivity. EDM has become one of the most important and cost-effective method of machining extremely tough and brittle electrically conductive materials. It is widely used in the process of making moulds and dies and sections of complex geometry and intricate shapes. The work piece material selected in this experiment is EN 8 after reviewing all other materials. The input variable parameters are current, voltage, pulse on time and duty factor. Taguchi Method is applied to create an Orthogonal Array of input variables using the Design Of Experiment (DOE). The effect of variable parameters mentioned above upon Material Removal Rate (MRR) and Surface Roughness (SR) is analyzed and investigated. Each set of reading of Orthogonal Array is used by making two cuts of 1 mm depth and weight after first and second cut is checked to calculate average MRR and average surface roughness. Then analysis of the experiment is done in Taguchi to get the trend of MRR and SR with four variable input parameters.