Investigation of cylindrical wire electrical discharge turning (CWEDT) of AISI D3 tool steel based on statistical analysis

In this work, a surface roughness (Ra), roundness and material removal rate (MRR) study on the cylindrical wire electrical discharge turning (CWEDT) has been carried out. The material chosen in this case was AISI D3 tool steel due to its growing range of applications in the field of manufacturing tools, dies and molds as punch, tapping, reaming and so on in cylindrical forms. This study was made only for the finishing stages and has been carried out on the influence of four design factors: power, voltage, pulse off time and spindle rotational speed, over the three previous mentioned response variables. This has been done by means of the technique of design of experiments (DOE), which allows us to carry out the above-mentioned analysis performing a relatively small number of experiments. In this case, a 22 × 32 mixed full factorial design, has been selected considering the number of factors used in the present study. The resolution of this factorial design allows us to estimate all the main effects, factor interactions and pure quadratic effects of the four design factors selected to perform this study. For MRR, Ra and roundness regression models have been developed by using the response surface methodology (RSM).