Experimental and Numerical Analysis of Metal Removal Rate and Surface Finish on Al- Ti Alloy

Abstract

Advancement in technology has led to development of many materials with better qualities in order to develop products of greater value. This has led to a search for better materials to satisfy the ever growing demands of product requirement. One of this material is titanium alloys which is widely used in the aerospace and aircraft industry are due to their ability to maintain their high strength at elevated temperature, and high resistance for corrosion. They are also being used increasingly in chemical process, automotive, biomedical and nuclear industry .[1,2]Titanium and its alloy are considered as important engineering materials for industrial applications because of good strength to weight ratio, superior corrosion resistance and high temperature applicability. They also has outstanding resistance to corrosion in most natural and much industrial process environment. When machining titanium alloy with conventional machines, the tool wear rate progress rapidly. Some type of tool material including cemented carbide, ceramics are highly reactive with titanium alloy at high temperature. As these materials are harder and comparatively have higher strength when compare to other materials therefore conventional machining process are not suitable for machining these hard materials and to get complicated profiles is very difficult hence Non-conventional machining process is suitable to machine these materials, one such process is EDM-(Electric discharge machining).[3] Metal removal rate (MRR), Surface roughness (SR) are the two most important parameters which can be measured and varied using EDM process. The surface roughness of the machined surfaces was measured with surface roughness measuring instrument SURFTRONIC 3+. The present paper deals with machining of metal Al-Ti Alloy .In which MRR modelling has been carried out using axi-symmetric model of MMC during EDM machining.A FEA model of single spark EDM was developed to calculate the temperature distribution. Further, single spark model was extended to multi-discharge machining material removal was calculated by calculating the number of pulses and experiments were conducted using CNC Sinking Electrical Discharge Machine (CHMER Thai van Make) validation of model has been done by comparing experimental results with analytical results and good agreement was found out.