An Experimental Investigation on Micropolishing of Metal Matrix Composite using Fabricated Elastic Emission Machining Setup

The increasing the need of accurate and high precision machining to produce miniature product researchers have developed different modern techniques for machining of hard, brittle and nonconductive materials. The major advantage of these techniques lies in the fact of its ability to remove material at the atomic level by mechanical, chemical, thermal etc. methods and to give completely mirrored, crystallographically and physically undisturbed finished surface. Elastic Emission Machining (EEM) is one of the modern machining processes which can be effectively used for finishing of miniature parts. However, material removal rate in Elastic Emission Machining (EEM) is very less because of the limited machining region is contact during machining. To increase the machining rate, a cylindrical polyurethane wheel is used as a tool with assisted abrasive particles. Keeping in view an EEM set-up has been developed and utilized for surface finishing of Al/Al2O3-MMC work piece. This research reports the influence of the major process parameters such as rotation speed of the wheel, gap distance, concentration and load on the material removal rate and surface finish. The material removal rate is considered as an important response parameter for the evaluation of surface finish. Experimentally acquired results are utilized and constructed the analysis of variance (ANOVA) table to identify the significant process parameters. From ANOVA, it is formed that the parameters gap distance and rotational speed significantly affect the material removal rate (MRR,mg/min).