OPTIMIZATION OF MACHINING PARAMETERS FOR SURFACE ROUGHNESS IN EDM OF AISI 1045 BASED ON TAGUCHI TECHNIQUE

Electrical discharge machining (EDM) is a nontraditional manufacturing technique that has been widely used in the production of tools and dies throughout the world in recent years. The most important performance measure in EDM is the surface roughness. In this study, the effect and optimization of machining parameters on surface roughness in an EDM operation was investigated by using the Taguchi method. The experimental studies were conducted under varying discharge current, duty cycle and pulse-duration. An orthogonal array, the signal-to-noise (S/N) ratio, and the analysis of variance (ANOVA) were employed to the study the surface roughness in the EDM of AISI 1045 tool steel. It was observed that the discharge current was the most influential factors on the surface roughness. To validate the study, confirmation experiment has been carried out at optimum set of parameters and predicted results have been found to be in good agreement with experimental findings. Keywords: Surface roughness, EDM, ANOVA