Experimental investigation of vibration assisted electrical discharge drilling of Al-Tib 2

In the present work the vibration-assisted electrical discharge drilling (VA-EDD) setup is developed to drill electrically conductive metal matrix composites materials on which machining with conventional methods is a challenging task. In addition to machine's Z-axis feed the tool electrode is employed with a vibrational movement of up to 1000 Hz frequency and up to 14 µm vibration amplitude. During the machining of Al-TiB2 with VA-EDD process the effect of controllable process variables viz-pulse current (Ip), vibration amplitude and frequency, pulse off time (Toff), pulse on time (Ton) and tool rotation have been investigated on material removal rate (MRR) and Surface roughness (SR). The vibration of tool significantly removes the debris particles by taking it away from the inter-electrode gap (IEG). While comparing the results of VA-EDD process with rotary Electrical Discharge Machining (EDM) process it has been found that the MRR was increased by 1.6 times. After the experiments the parameters which were found to be suitable for getting the higher MRR without compromising the surface quality are the vibration frequency of 450 Hz and amplitude of 8 µm.