Micro-ECM Drilling of Copper Alloy and Taguchi Optimization

The objective of the study is to conduct experiments to investigate the performance of Electrochemical Micromachining (EMM) process to drill micro-holes on Copper alloy and analyze the parameters to optimize by Taguchi method. An EMM setup developed in-house is used to conduct the experiments. Copper alloy as workpiece, Stainless Steel needle of sharp conical edge as tool and Sodium Nitrate as electrolyte are used. A Pulse generator is used to supply pulsed current. The input parameters analyzed for optimization are Voltage, Pulse on-time and Electrolyte Concentration. The Material Removal Rate (MRR) and Overcut are taken as output parameters to study the process performance. The experiment was designed according to L9 Orthogonal Array (OA) of Taguchi design. The observations have shown that the MRR increases and the accuracy decreases when the level of input value for any parameter is increased. The process parameters are optimized using Taguchi Analysis.