Abstract
Electrical discharge machining (EDM) is a non-conventional machining process that removes material by consecutive electrical sparks. Fast EDM drilling is one of such processes, which employs rotary tubular electrodes and inner flushing to enhance the machining efficiency and stability. It is widely used to produce small holes on various kinds of products. The breakout event occurs when the electrode just penetrates the workpiece during the drilling process, which marks the start of the breakout stage of the process. At this moment, the outlet of the hole is smaller than the desired due to severe radial tool wear, and the hole is not completed. As a result, further feeding is needed before the electrode fully penetrates the workpiece. To avoid back-strikes, the hole completion detection is crucial. However, the uncertainty of longitudinal and radial tool wear makes it difficult. This paper proposes a novel method to detect the hole completion by analyzing the discharge signals in the breakout stage. Besides, for the machining efficiency to become much lower in the breakout stage, the control strategy is also proposed to improve it by adjusting the reference voltage and gain factor of the servo controller. The optimal parameters were found by a full-factorial experiment. Experiments were conducted to validate the proposed methods by drilling holes at various inclinations. The results show that the proposed hole completion detection method could successfully sense the hole completion without misjudgments. And the electrode was fed at most 1.81 mm out of the hole outlet when the detection was made. Besides, the proposed control strategy improved the machining efficiency by up to 56.2% in the breakout stage in the experiments.
Published Version
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