Analysis of MRR and Surface Roughness in Machining Ti-6Al-4V ELI Titanium Alloy Using EDM Process

Titanium alloy is widely used in various industries like aerospace and automobile industries because it has good strength to weight ratio. Titanium alloy is also use in petrochemical, architectural and various medical equipment industries. Machining of titanium is very difficult because of its poor thermal conductivity, high heat stress, high pressure loads, varying chip thickness and residual stress. In present work, Ti-6Al-4V ELI (Grade 23) was machined with EDM machining process taking pulse on time, voltage and current as the process parameters. Surface finish and Material removal rate of each job was calculated. Surface morphology was done on the machined surface to check the behavior of the work piece. Multi response Grey Relation Analysis (GRA) technique was used to optimize the process parameters and main effects plot was drawn to observe the impact of parameters over MRR and surface roughness. It is observed that MRR and surface roughness were directly proportional to discharge current. The optimized values associated with machining are as follows: 18A discharge current, 100 µs pulse on time and 40 V.