Experimental investigation of tungsten and copper carbide coating on AISI 1020 steel using electro discharge coating process

Abstract

This paper elaborates about the material deposition rate (MDR) processed by electro discharge coating (EDC). Powder metallurgy (PM) route was considered for preparation of tool electrodes are in different proportions of W-Cu for the EDC process. The substrate material was of AISI 1020 steel. The experiments were carried out using Electric discharge machining (EDM). The process parameters were considered as peak current, pulse on time and compositions in different proportions of tungsten and copper (W-Cu) based on preliminary experiments. The optimization of the process was done by using Taguchi technique. A total of L16 orthogonal array was considered for experimentation. The Taguchi analysis was done to identify the importance of the levels and optimal parameters for the electro discharge coating. The significance of the process parameters was tested using Analysis of variance (ANOVA) conducted at 95% confidence level. The peak current and pulse duration effect on the material deposition rate is evaluated. The experimental results shows that peak current and pulse duration has important role on the performance of the coating within the processing range. The microstructure of the specimen was done by Scanning electron microscope (SEM) to recognize the presence of W-Cu coating on the substrate surface.