Investigation of Surface Modification of 60CrMoV18-5 Steel by EDM with Cu-ZrO2 Powder Metallurgy Green Compact Electrode

Electrical discharge machining (EDM) is a non-conventional machining process, which is mostly used for machining of difficult-to-cut materials. These materials are often used in engineering applications that require improved surface properties; thus, surface modification is desirable in these cases. In the recent past, it has been observed that EDM is an alternative surface modification process due to migration of material from the electrode to the workpiece surface. Surface modification can be done with powder metallurgy (P/M) electrode as tool. The aim of this work is to examine the surface modification of the tool steel Calmax (Uddeholm) by EDM process using Cu-30 wt.% ZrO2 P/M green compact electrode. The influence of peak current (Ip) and pulse-on (Ton) on the Material Transfer Rate (MTR) and Surface Roughness (SR) was investigated and the surface characteristics were also evaluated by scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The experimental results confirm the material migration from the electrode to the machined surface and show that the higher MTR of 46.5 mgr/min is achieved on the combination of Ip = 9 A and Ton = 25 mu s and the Ra varies from 3.72 mu m to 7.12 mu m.