The Electric Discharge Machining is one of the popular non-traditional approaches which has huge utility in industrial sectors, mostly in die-making industries and as well as in bio-medical fields. But more power consumption, evolvement of unhygienic gases, development of non- biodegradable wastes, etc. are some curtail issues, which leads the poor sustainability of the EDM operation. In this approach, transesterified neem is introduced as a new and green dielectric medium of EDM, and its impacts on EDM responses are examined. Here, machining is carried out between 4 A to 10 A ranges of input current, 100 μ-sec to 200 μ-sec of pulse ON time and 10 μsec to 30 μ-sec of pulse OFF time using both kerosene and transesterified neem as a dielectric medium. The responses like MRR, surface roughness, and microscopic views of machined surfaces are analyzed to check the viability of transesterified neem as a dielectric medium of EDM.It is experimentally observed that transesterified neem as a dielectric medium ensured 6.2 % to 15.6 % more removal rate and 12.25 % to 15.45 % less surface roughness than kerosene.
Low removal rate, high power consumption, and dependency on conventional fuels (kerosene as a dielectric) are some premier issues that keep the sustainability index of EDM low, though it has huge acceptability and popularity mostly in aviation sectors and biomedical instrumentation to machine some extensively hard ferrous and nonferrous metal/metal alloys. Besides these, the thermal agitation inside the fusion/machining zone partially burns the dielectrics and tool-workpiece-metal, which evolve some oxides/monoxides. These evolved gases promote an unhygienic breathing atmosphere, which is very much harmful to the operator's health. Sometimes because of inadequate flushing pressure and velocity, carbon particles deposited inside the crater makes the spark unstable and releases carbon monoxide when the temperature exceeds its melting point. According to ISO 14000, every manufacturing process must be comprised of the sustainability criteria, which maintains a compromised balance between the economic, environmental, and social aspects, including the issue of the operator's health. But in real practices, it is very tough to maintain a stoichiometric balance between all these constraints. The article intensely focuses on the issue of emergence of gases during machining and tries to promote the utility of some alternative vegetable oil-based dielectrics, which are experimentally justified as a potent alternative of conventional kerosene. Apart from these, it includes some comparative talks on dielectric nature and their impacts on the responses and surface properties. Finally, this article highlights some compromise solutions which are probably capable of mitigating the hurdles to some extent, so that the sustainable machining can be encouraged in real sense.
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