Performance of Cu-Cr-Zr electrodes in electrical discharge machining of tungsten carbide composite material base using Taguchi method

The research aimed to study the performance of Cu-Cr-Zr electrode material in the electrical discharge manning (EDM) process of tungsten carbide WC90-Co10 grade using parameters such as duty factor, discharge current, and electrode polarity. The present work involves evaluation based on the effect of process parameters on material removal rate (MRR), electrode wear ratio (EWR), and surface roughness (SR) of the EDM tungsten carbide process. The experiment used an electrode of 10 mm in diameter and 1 mm depth of cut for the EDM sparking process under a dielectric fluid. The results showed that the electrode negative polarity performed better than the positive polarity and the MRR stood at 1.76 mm3 /min of 76% duty factor while the SR was 2.52 μm. Additionally, the effects of the parameters were found to be significant compared to other factors though the techniques predicted near similar results based on Taguchi's technique of ANOVA analysis. © 2016 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.