Experimental investigation in sustainable electric discharge drilling of Inconel alloy using grey-based fuzzy logic approach

Abstract

In the present era of manufacturing, sustainable processes are preferred for healthy and ecofriendly environment. To avoid the environmental pollutants and hazardous fumes during the drilling of Inconel-718 alloy, electrical discharge drilling (EDD) process has been used with deionized water as a dielectric medium in the present study. The process performance in terms of metal removal rate (MRR) and hole taper has been controlled by using four process variables such as discharge current, pulseduration, pulse interval and dielectric flushing pressure. The experiments were designed with the help of Box Behnken design (BBD) technique and further, the experimental results have been analyzed to optimize the process performance by using the grey-based fuzzy logic approach. The application of optimization approach has improved the MRR by 62.6% and hole taper is reduced by 20.23%. The parametric study has been carried out to examine the process behaviour with the variation of variables and pulse duration is found as most significant parameter for the study.