Experimental study of plasma arc cutting of AISI 304 stainless steel

Plasma arc cutting process is frequently used to cut stainless steel, alloy steel, aluminum and other materials. This paper presents a study on the plasma arc cutting of AISI 304 stainless steel. The experiment has been performed by taking into consideration of three process parameters and three factor levels for each parameter. Gas pressure, traverse speed and thickness of material are taken as the input process parameters. A full factorial design of experiment has been set which consists of 27 experimental runs. After performing the experiments the material removal rate (MRR) and surface roughness value have been measured. Considering these two responses variables, Analysis of Variance has been performed in order to identify the effect of each input process parameters on the MRR and surface roughness. A multi objective optimization is also done to find the optimum value of MRR and surface roughness for a set of predicted value of input process parameters. (c) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.