An investigation on the effect of the applied workpiece vibrations on the machining performance in electrical discharge machining

In this study, vibrations with different frequencies are applied to workpiece for improving the electrical discharge machining stability and performance outputs. Experiments are conducted with different machining conditions such as discharge current, pulse duration and machining depth. Tool wear rate (TWR) and relative wear (RW) are dropped at experiments with machining tank vibration (MTV-EDM) and workpiece vibration (WV-EDM), when compared to experiments without vibrations. According to the results of experiment with vibration, increase in workpiece removal rate (WRR), and drop at surface roughness of workpiece (Ra) are less compared improvements at other parameters. Experiments conducted by applying vibrations on the workpiece at various machining depth clearly demonstrate that increasing frequency values especially at high current values results in an increase in WRR values and decrease in TWR, RW, Ra values. Since the vibration of the machining tank at the desired frequency and amplitude is not technically practical, it is realized from the experimental results that the use of WV-EDM technique seems to be much more promising in EDM field.