Analysis of the influence of EDM parameters on surface quality, MRR and EW of WC-CO

Electrical discharge machining (EDM) is a process for shaping hard metals and forming deep complex shaped holes by arc erosion in all kinds of electro-conductive materials. The objective of this research is to study the influence of operating parameters of EDM of tungsten carbide on the machining characteristics such as surface quality,material removal rate and electrode wear. The effectiveness of EDM process with tungsten carbide,WC-Co is evaluated in terms of the material removal rate,the relative wear ratio and the surface finish quality of the workpiece produced. It is observed that copper tungsten is most suitable for use as the tool electrode in EDM of WC-Co. Better machining performance is obtained generally with the electrode as the cathode and the workpiece as an anode. In this research, a study was carried out on the influence of the parameters such peak currrent,power supply voltage,pulse on time and pulse off time. The surface quality that was investigated in this experiment was surface roughness using perthometer machine. Material removal rate (MRR) and electrode wear (EW) in this experiment was calculated by using mathematical method. The result of the experiment then was collected and analyzed using STATISTICA software. This was done by using the technique of design of experiments (DOE) and technique such as ANOVA analysis. This analysis was purposed to select the optimal machining condition for use in confirmation test. The confirmation test was purposed to evaluated the error margin between predicted result by software and confirmation result by experiment in terms of the machining characteristics