Experimental investigation and multi objective optimization of EDM machining performance parameters on Ti-6Al-4V

This paper presents the work carried out to study the effect of EDM process parameters viz., flushing pressure, pulse-on time, current and pulse-off time using Ti-6Al-4V as workpiece material. The output parameters considered are material removal rate (MRR), surface roughness and Tool Wear Rate (TWR) and three different tool materials viz, copper, bronze and brass were used for comparison. To control the economic issues, experiments were conducted using Taguchi’s techniques by varying machining process parameters at three levels and the number of experiments were limited to 18 following the L18 orthogonal array of Taguchi’s method. The results obtained were analyzed by comparing the effect of each input parameter on the characteristics of machining, and for predicting the optimal choice for each machining requirement. From this study, observed that the pulse-on time is the highly influencing input process parameter for the substrate machined using copper (Cu) electrode.