Computer aided Genetic Algorithm based Optimization of Electrical Discharge Drilling in Titanium alloy (Grade-5) Sheet

Abstract

Abstract Precise and micro holes in the different advanced materials such as Ti and their alloys is a very challenging task due to unfavourable characteristics of these materials by conventional machining. These problems may be minimised upto some extent by using new class of machining processes such as advanced machining processes. In the category of advanced machining processes, the electrical discharge drilling is the efficient and cost effective machining process for the machining of these materials. But some quality characteristics such as hole circularity, hole taper and hole dilation are the main problem associated during the machining of these materials by using electrical discharge machining. These may be minimized by selecting the optimum process parameter levels. In this study, the experiments have been conducted by using L27 orthogonal array. The discharge current, pulse on time, pulse off time and dielectric pressure have been selected as input process parameters and hole circularity, hole taper and hole dilation as output parameters. The multi regression models for hole circularity, hole dilation and hole taper have been developed by using the experimental data. The statistical analysis for the developed models shows that the models are reliable and adequate and may be used for predicting these quality characteristics satisfactorily. These quality characteristics have been optimized by using computer aided genetic algorithm based optimization method. For the optimization, the multi regression models for circularity, dilation and taper have been considered as objective function. The multi-objective optimization result obtained by computer aided genetic algorithm based optimization method, show improvements in all of the quality characteristics.