Study on thermal deformation behavior and microstructural characteristics of wire electrical discharge machining thin-walled components

Wire electrical discharge machine (WEDM) has been successfully applied to aerospace field, mold industry and medical apparatus and instruments due to its excellent abilities. However, thermal deformation behavior of thin-walled components is always ignored due to no macro-force in the WEDM process, and different materials processed by WEDM have different thermal deformation behaviors. This work mainly describes the complex thermal deformation behavior during the WEDM processing the thin-walled components of three typical engineering materials, namely AISI H13, SKD11, and Inconel 718. Firstly, a large number of experiments are conducted to investigate the effects of pulse-on time, water pressure, and wire speed on the thermal deformation of three different materials. Through analyzing the experimental results, it was not only confirmed the significance and universality of thermal deformation in WEDM processing different materials, but also revealed that the effects of physical properties of workpiece materials and process parameters of WEDM on the deformation scale. Furthermore, it was concluded that the yield strength and thermal conductivity of materials both paly the significant roles in the thermal deformation. What's more, we also presented micro-structure characteristics and residual stress of thin-walled components with the thermal deformation. Eventually, several more complex but interesting deformation phenomena during the WEDM process were introduced and discussed.