Travelling Wire Electrochemical Discharge Machining System Development for Precision Machining of Non-Conducting Materials

Traveling Wire Electrochemical Discharge Machining (TW-ECDM) System has great potential to cut non-conducting engineering hard materials such as ceramics and composites etc. There is also an urgent need for precision machining of engineering ceramics and composites with the development of these materials. Several non-conventional machining processes are available but all of them have inherent difficulties. The traditional method of slicing glass and ceramics, quartz etc. is limited mainly due to high cutting force and requirement of utra-hard tool materials. Hence there is a need to develop an efficient method of cutting and slicing non-conducting engineering materials. Traveling Wire Electrochemical Discharge Machining (TW-ECDM) is an important useful process for this purpose. Present research paper includes the design and development of the experimental setup of total TW-ECDM system which consists of main machining chamber, mechanical hardware modules, electrolyte flow control units and electrical pulsed dc power supply unit. The operation of the developed TWECDM System has been tested after carrying out some experimentation on cutting of Silicon Nitride.