Investigation of electro-discharge machining performance of 32CRMOV12-10 steel

In this study, 32CrMoV12-10 steel, three different electrodes (copper, graphite and tuncop), three different discharge currents (10, 20, 30 A) and three different impact times (200, 400, 600 µs) fixed depth of cut (1 mm) and fixed dwell time (50 µs) parameters, machinability experiments were carried out. During the experiments, the processing time, hole diameter, material wear amount, surface roughness measurements were made and the results obtained were examined experimentally. According to the experimental results, with the increase of the discharge current and the impact time, the machining time decreased, the hole diameter, material wear amount and surface roughness values increased. As a result of the study, in the experiments performed with 32 and 50 HRC hardness, the most suitable machining parameters for the machining time were found to be 2 min with a copper electrode material with a discharge current of 30 A and a pulse time of 600 µs. The optimum machining parameters for the hole diameter were obtained as copper electrode for the electrode material, 10 A for the discharge current, and 12.2085 mm for the pulse duration of 200 µs. The most suitable machining parameters for the amount of material wear were determined as 0.9883 g with a graphite electrode at a current of 30 A and a pulse time of 600 µs. The most suitable machining parameters for surface roughness were determined as 7.2 µm with copper electrode material with 10 A discharge current, 200 µs pulse time. Surface roughness values for 50 HRC were found to be better than 32 HRC.