Influence of Variant Electrolyte in Electrochemical Micromachining of Micro Holes in SMA Using Taguchi Optimization

Abstract

Electrochemical micromachining (ECMM) is one of the commercially successful modern machining processes used in various manufacturing industries. Nitinol, a shape memory alloy (SMA) material used as micro and nano component in bio medical fields is difficult to machine using traditional methods due to its super elasticity and shape memory effect. This problem induced in studying the machining characteristics of NiTi alloy using ECMM Process. In this work, an effort is taken to produce micro holes in SMA—NiTi alloy of 0.25 mm thickness using variant electrolytes such as the passivating electrolyte (PE) and the non-passivating electrolyte (NPE) to study the machining characteristics. The variable input parameters considered are voltage, duty cycle and feed rate to study their effect on performance characteristics such as MRR, overcut, circularity and conicity. This study resulted in finding the suitable and optimized parameters for machining Nitinol with PE and NPE with better precision and good surface integrity. Optimization studies are also carried out by Taguchi method using minitab statistical software.