Fabrication of Taper Free Micro-Holes Utilizing a Combined Rotating Helical Electrode and Short Voltage Pulse by ECM

Fabrication of the injection nozzle micro-hole on the aero engine is a difficult problem in today’s manufacturing industry. In addition to the size requirements, the nozzle micro-hole also requires no burr, no taper and no heat-affected zone. To solve the above problem, an ultra-short voltage pulse and a high-speed rotating helical electrode were used in electrochemical drilling (ECD) process. Firstly, a theoretical model of ECD with ultra-short voltage pulse was established to investigate the effects of many predominant parameters on machining accuracy, and the effect of rotating helical electrode on the gap flow field was analyzed. Secondly, sets of experiments were carried out to investigate the effects of many key parameters on machining accuracy and efficiency. Finally, the optimized parameters were applied to machine micro holes on 500 μm thickness of GH4169 plate, and micro-holes with the diameter of 186 μm with no taper were machined at the feed rate of 1.2 μm/s. It is proved that the proposed ECD process for fabricating micro-holes with no taper has a huge potential and broad application prospects.

Experimental Investigation of Cut Profile in the Electrochemical Drilling of Titanium Alloy

Electrochemical machining process is an advanced material removal technique offering high precision and introducing no heat damage to the work material. The shape and size of machined area are highly dependent on some process parameters such as voltage, electrolyte and inter-electrode gap. To further enable a more insight into the process performance, this paper investigates the influences of applied voltage, electrolyte concentration and inter-electrode gap on the shape and sizes of hole produced by the electrochemical drilling process. Titanium alloy (Ti-6Al-4V) was used as a work sample in this study as it has been extensively used in many advanced applications. The experimental result indicated that the use of high voltage and high electrolyte concentration can enlarge and deepen hole in the workpiece, while the inter-electrode gap provided less effect to the hole features. The maximum hole depth can reach 300 μm within 60 seconds when the applied voltage of 30 V, the inter-electrode gap of 10 μm and the electrolyte concentration of 10%wt were used. However, with this setup, the obtained cut profile became a non-uniform V-shaped hole. The use of lower voltage was instead recommended to yield a better cut quality with U-shaped profile.