Electrical Discharge Machining (EDM) Deep and Blind Holes
ZHOU Ming1, JING Hongyan1, WANG Zhendong2
1. School of Mechanical-Electronic and Automobile Engineering, Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture, Beijing 100044, China;
2. China Institute of Atomic Energy, Beijing 102413, China
The advantages of electrical discharge machining (EDM) over traditional machining have earned its wide applications in industrial world. However, the low machining stability caused by the inherent characteristics of EDM, high discharge frequency, small discharge gap, and strong disturbances, has hindered its further development, especially in deep, blind hole making because of difficulty in removing debris out of the gap in deep holes, causing the occurrences of arcing pulses and damaging work-piece surface. In order to improve process stability of machining deep and blind holes and solve the issue of machining such kind of high-melting-point, difficult-to-cut materials as titanium-zirconium-molybdenum alloy (TZM), this paper has developed an adaptive double variable control system. In this control system electrode-discharge-cycle and gapservo-voltage were taken as control variables adaptively tuned, by two-step-ahead control strategy, with respect to variations of arcing ratios and discharging ratios respectively. One confirmation test demonstrated that this control system had improved machined depth of a hole more than 3.7 times from that by conventional EDM in machining Cr12MoV material. The other test confirmed that this control system helped to machine a blind hole, with a copper electrode of diameter 16mm, in the hard-tocut TZM of nearly 2640℃ melting point up to a depth of 93mm at an almost steady machining rate. The conventional EDM could hardly machine this kind of material. All these facts revealed that the developed adaptive double variable control system had endowed EDM with much stronger power to extend its applications in the newly developed materials.