Study on Processing of Titanium Aluminide Alloy Using Electrical Discharge Machining

Abstract

Currently there is a continuous extension of application areas of titanium aluminides but their processing encounters a number of difficulties such as the precision of machining and modifying the properties of the surface layer. In the specialist literature [1, 2, 4, 7] different authors address the processing of these materials by conventional methods. In this context, this paper aims at finding the optimal regimes for the electrical discharge machining (EDM) of titanium aluminides Ti-40Al-5NB-3V and provides the analysis of the process parameters effect on cutting through wire EDM technological characteristics. In the case of wire EDM a relatively good output has been obtained as well as very good roughness of the processed surfaces. On the contrary, when considering the die sinking edm, due to very small output, several experimental measurements were performed on three machines – Sodick, ONA and ELER. Based on the experimental data, it has been established that the best output is to be obtained by reverse polarity machining.