Investigation on Fabrication of SS316 Gear by Wire-EDM

Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Technology, University of Johannesburg, 2028 Johannesburg, South Africa

^* Corresponding author: kgupta@uj.ac.za

Abstract

Manufacturing of miniature gears with good accuracy and quality, and at low cost is a challenging task for traditional manufacturing processes. Wire-cut electric discharge machining (WEDM) has the capacity to machine any conductive material to fabricate typical shaped products like gears with high level of accuracy and quality. In present research, stainless steel (SS) alloy 316 is used to fabricate miniature gears by WEDM. The experimental array is designed according to Response Surface Methodology (RSM) based central composite face centered (CCFC). Four input parameters namely servo feed (SF), duty factor (DF), servo voltage (SV) and wire feed (WF) with three levels each are used for experimental array to investigate the process performance in terms of cutting rate (CR), and product i.e. gear quality in terms of mean roughness depth (Rz) and dimensional deviation (DD). After WEDM parameter optimization, confirmation experiments are performed at the parametric setting by considering equal importance to all response variables. A very close agreement between the experimental and predicted values have been observed.