Experimental results and analysis for Electrical Discharge Machining (EDM) of aluminium metal matrix composites with powder-mixed dielectric: Lenth's method

This paper reports the work on EDM with SiC abrasive powder-mixed dielectric, a hybrid process. The machining of 6061Al/Al2O3p/20p work specimens has been carried out with copper electrode. An L18 orthogonal array (OA) was employed for the optimisation of the performance measures such as material removal rate and surface roughness. The effects of seven control factors (three levels each) and a noise factor (two level), and one two-variable interactions on the responses were quantitatively evaluated by the Lenth's method. Analysed results indicate that the process effectively improves the MRR and reduces the surface roughness, in comparison with the conventional EDM.