Abstract:
Electrochemical machining (ECM) is a one of non-traditional machining process belonging to electrochemical type. ECM is one of the commonly used advanced machining processes particularly employed for manufacturing complicated or complex geometry on difficult-to-machine materials. In today’s manufacturing era, electrochemical-machining process provides good surface finish due to its controlled atomic dissolution of work material involving chemical reactions during machining. To enhance the machining performance, precise selection of machining parameters is still a demanding job in ECM process as it is very complex process involving so many unpredictable chemical reactions while machining. In this work, material removal rate (MRR) has been investigated. Aluminium alloy was used as work material and sodium chloride (NaCl) solution was selected as electrolyte. The effect of three parameters namely (voltage, flow rate of electrolyte and electrolyte concentration) on the material removal rate (MRR) has been considered. Thirty-five experiments were carried out. Three various values for each parameter were selected to carry out this study for voltage (10, 15, 20) V, for flow rate (8, 10, 12) l/min, and for concentration (50, 75, 100) g/l. The results indicated that the higher values of MRR were (0.1598, 0.1216, and 0.1485) g/min when value of each parameter voltage, flow rate and concentration was 20 V, 12 l/min, and 100 g/l respectively. In addition, the MRR generally increased with increase of the voltage, flow rate, and concentration of electrolyte as the trend might be different in each condition. However, the voltage was the prominent factor that affects the MRR significantly.
