A Taguchi Approach to Optimize Electrochemical Discharge Machining of E-glass Fibre Reinforced Polymer Composite

E-glass fibre reinforced polymer composite becomes very popular in advance manufacturing industries due to their attractive mechanical properties. E-glass fibre is an electrically non-conductive material which is very intricate to machine by conventional machining processes and facing many problems. In this research work, the experiments were done according to Taguchi L27 orthogonal array with S/N ratio analysis. DC supply voltage, electrolyte concentration, pulse-on-time, pulse-off-time and inter-electrode gap were used as machining parameters, and their effect were observed as a response characteristic such as tool wear rate (TWR). The experimental results were concluded with the help of analysis of variance (ANOVA) which indicated that voltage was the most dominant factor for tool wear rate followed by pulse-off-time. Further establish the optimal machining parameter combination while machine micro-hole in e-glass fibre reinforced polymer composite using electrochemical discharge machining (ECDM) process and the surface texture of the used tool electrode was analysed by scanning electron microscope (SEM).