An investigation of mechanical properties and material removal rate, tool wear rate in EDM machining process of AL2618 alloy reinforced with Si3N4, AlN and ZrB2 composites

•Increasing mechanical properties with addition of reinforcements.•EDM machining on AL2618 ALLOY REINFORCED WITH Si3N4, AlN AND ZrB2 COMPOSITES in insitu-composites.•To find out the best process parameters using Taguchi and ANOVA method.•Material removal rate (MRR) and tool wear rate (TWR) are minimized.•Composite is the best process parameter on influencing material removal rate (MRR) and tool wear rate (TWR) and depth.

It is submitted that new approach is tried to find out what would be the outcome if Aluminum 2618 reinforced by AlN (Aluminum Nitride), Si3N4 (Silicon Nitride) & ZrB2(Zirconium Boride) particles were fabricated in Wt % (x = 0,2,4,6,8) by stir casting method. If the wt% is increased, the mechanical properties of the composite will proportionally increase. There will be no other promising technique than Electrical Discharge Machining (EDM) for machining metal matrix composites when they were conducted on the Aluminum 2618 composite work piece using a copper electrode in an EDM machining. It becomes very vital in the field machines and mechanism to find out Current(I), Pulse on time(TON), Pulse off time (TOFF) on Metal Removal Rate (MRR),Tool Wear Rate(TWR) on the machining of hybrid Al2618 metal matrix composites. Taghuchi's design of experiment was used to analyse the machining characteristics of hybrid composites. To effect the parameters like current (I), Pulse on time(TON), Pulse off time (TOFF) has been chosen as the input parameters of this work. Machining results go to show that Al2618 composites have improved mechanical properties and as a result of Material Removal Rate (MRR) and Tool Wear Rate (TWR) are reduced. Hence ANOVA (Analysis of Variance) and signal to Noise ratio are used to determine the influence of input parameters on the Material Removal Rate and Tool Wear Rate (TWR).

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