A comprehensive study of electrochemical machining of monel-400 alloy with different electrolytes: Research challenges

Abstract

Electrochemical machining plays an important role in production and manufacturing industries like aircraft, atomic and healthcare. Even with difficult –to- machine materials, ECM is generally preferred to machine- nickel- based alloys like Monel 400 or Monel super alloy which consists of about 67 % Nickel and 23 % Copper. It is highly unaffected to corrosion and various acids such as sulphuric acid (H2SO4), hydrochloric acid (HCl) etc. due to which it is highly used in aerospace, oil production and refining, marine applications, industrial heat exchangers. Nowadays nickel hydroxides are major concerns which are toxic to environment present in sludge while machining nickel based alloys like Monel alloys and other super alloys need to be filtered before discharged into environment. This paper reviews the Electrochemical machining of Monel 400 alloy by various influencing parameters like applied voltage, current density, concentration of electrolyte, electrolyte pressure and type of electrolyte on material removal rate (MRR) tool wear rate (TWR) and surface roughness (SR). The study also suggests that the varying process parameters of ECM machining influence the various machining performances such as material removal rate (MRR) tool wear rate (TWR) and Surface finish (Ra) for Monel 400 alloy. In a recent study which utilized meta-heuristic algorithms (MFO and GWO) helped in increasing MRR by 0.242 g/min and Nickel presence by 57.72 PPM while machining Monel 400 and hence a better machining performance is obtained. The paper also aims at addressing the latest developments in machining Monel alloy as compared with conventional methods of machining and its various research challenges for further developments in non-traditional machining processes.