TAGUCHI OPTIMIZATION OF MULTIPLE PERFORMANCE CHARACTERISTICS IN THE ELECTRICAL DISCHARGE MACHINING OF THE TIGR2

Electrical discharge machining (EDM) provides many advantages for the shaping of metallic materials. It also provides better surface quality for Ti alloys used in the defense industry.  In this study, experiments were carried out with different EDM parameters using the Titanium (Gr2) alloy. A number of novel industrial processes have been developed as a result of advances in technology. For a product to be developed, these novel approaches must be utilized to determine optimum parameters. The Taguchi method was applied in the experiments with EDM. The impact the test parameters had on the performance characteristics of tool wear rate, material removal rate, depth, and surface roughness were analyzed by the variance analysis (ANOVA). Quadratic regression analyses were carried out to reveal the correlation between the experimental results and the predicted values. According to the ANOVA results for material removal rate (MRR), tool wear rate (TWR), depth, and surface roughness, the most effective factor was amperage, at 99.66%, 99.56%, 87.95%, and 81.12%, respectively.  The best value for average surface roughness was determined to be 3.29 µm obtained at 120 μs time-on, 8 A, and 40 μs time-off.