To adapt with today's rapidly changing world, fabrication of intricate microparts is becoming an urgent need. Manufacturing of these microparts with stringent requirements necessitates the early adoption of different microfabrication techniques. Wire electrochemical machining (WECM) is such a process which removes excess metal by dissolving it electrochemically. This process can easily generate features downscaled to micron ranges and offers several advantages like the requirement of very simple setup, fabrication of accurate complex microfeatures without undergoing any thermal stress, burr formation, and tool wear, which make it superior from other existing micromachining processes. However, this process is new, and little is known about its applicability and feasibility. Hence, the present work is directed towards developing suitable WECM setup to fabricate microfeatures by introducing proper means for enhancing the mass transport phenomenon. The tungsten tool wire for machining has been in situ etched to a diameter of 23.43 μm by a novel approach for retaining its regular cylindrical form and has been implemented during machining. Moreover, the influences of high duty ratio and applied frequency have been investigated on the corresponding width of the fabricated microslits and the experimental results have been represented graphically where the minimum width of the microslit is obtained as 44.85 μm. Furthermore, mathematical modeling has been developed to correlate duty ratio and applied frequency with generated slit width. Additionally, the mathematical modeling has been validated with practical results and complex stepped type microfeatures have been generated to establish process suitability.
Newly developed wire electrochemical machining (WECM) operates in the same principle of electrochemical machining (ECM) and has recently been very popular for fabrication of different microfeatures effectively. However, the capability and possibility of this newer process is still out of limelight and require specific and extensive research to explore. Hence, the present research work deals with indigenous development of suitable WECM setup for fabricating microslits with feed values as high as that employed during wire electrical discharge machining (WEDM) process, thereby making WECM a cost effective technique for batch scale production. The influence of applied voltage and duty ratio on maximum feed has been investigated and mathematical modeling for finding out a correlation between maximum feed with values of voltage and duty ratio has been developed and validated. Moreover, maximum feed achieved with different parameter settings has been tabulated. It has been found that maximum feed that can be achieved during controlled machining with 18 V, 18% duty ratio, 50 kHz frequency and 0.1 M H 2 SO 4 is 0.84375 mm/min which can still be compared with feed rates commonly employed during WEDM, given the fact that tungsten wire of diameter as low as 50 μm has been used in the present study.
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