PARAMETRIC OPTIMIZATION OF ELECTRO STREAM DRILLING PROCESS

Abstract

Drilling deep microholes is of great importance in paper, automobile, aerospace, and in many other industries. It applications for cooling of turbine blades, electro Stream Drilling, which is a special application of electro chemical machining, is one of the techniques used to drill the holes having a large length to diameter (lid) ratio and having diameter 0.125 to 0.50 mm. The present work i.e. Parametric Optimization of Electro Stream Drilling has been completed in two phases. First phase includes the fabrication and assembly of experimental set-up and during second phase the experiments are conducted. The planning for conducting the experiment at different levels of parameters has been done on the basis of Taguchi's L27 array. In the present work four parameters viz: feed rate, pressure, voltage and concentration of electrolyte have been taken at three levels. Based on the experimental results, an empirical model has been developed. By ANOVA analysis, four parameters namely feed rate, pressure, voltage and conc. have been found to have their significant effect on the M.R.R. The % contribution effect of feed rate on M.R.R has been found to be more than the other parameters. Optimum levels of process parameters for maximum M.R.R were found out and confirmatory test has been conducted. The M.R.R found by confirmatory test varies by 6.67% from that of the predicted value of M.R.R