A fuzzy TOPSIS method for surface integrity criteria ranking using the wire electrical discharge machining process

Abstract

The objective of this study is to propose a method called the fuzzy technique for order preference by similarity to the ideal solution (F-TOPSIS) to select parameters of the wire electrical discharge machining (WEDM) process. Consequently, the parameters principally influencing the outputs of the WEDM process were identified and examined using the F-TOPSIS framework where the inputs of three decision makers, representing their opinions are incorporated into the analysis. The idea of parametric selection in a WEDM process is multicriteria-based when the production of nitinol-60 smart memory alloy (SMA) is critically considered. Current approaches of TOPSIS and analytic hierarchy process (AHP) evaluations to select the WEDM parameters fail because of the constraints of linguistic evaluations, but the use of F-TOPSIS crosses over the restriction to choose the best parameters in a WEDM process for nitinol-60 SMA. In this work, the experimental results obtained from published research were utilised to validate the proposed method. The validation of the suitability of F-TOPSIS, aided by the published work on the WEDM process, analysed the surface integrity of nitinol-60 SMA. From the five outputs, the closeness coefficients of the best and worst are found to be 0.7567 and 0.2838, respectively. This research aids the process engineer in optimising the outputs in the WEDM process, to select the best output. Hence, the research showcased how the WEDM process could select outputs efficiently, thus aiding process engineers to maintain the process to optimise parametric resource allocations and guarantee utmost productivity.