Scale effects and a method to evaluate similarity in electrochemical micromachining of Nitinol

In this manuscript, Electrochemical Micromachining (ECM) is well designed with the important concept called scale effect. The main objective is to evaluate the scale effects that occur when the machining parameters is transferred from micro ECM to macro ECM. Similarity theory is used to evaluate the scale effects quantitatively. Input process parameters such as feed rate, duty ratio and voltage are taken and designed as single factor orthogonal experiments to evaluate the scale effect occurred by response parameters such as Material removal rate (MRR) and geometrical features. Utilization of this concept provides improvement in the machining performances, reduction in the energy involved and also useful in optimizing the processing parameters. The similarity precision of the micro and macro systems is calculated. A positive scale effect is observed when the output values of MRR and geometrical features are normalized. No negative scale effect is observed in experimental results.