Experimental and Numerical Study of Material Removal in Electrochemical Discharge Machining (ECDM)

In this paper a novel approach is proposed to investigate the characteristics of the plasma channel and material removal in electrochemical discharge machining (ECDM) of glass. For this purpose, a specific pulsed voltage was applied to the ECDM process to perform single discharging on the glass workpiece. In this way, a voltage slightly lower than the critical voltage was applied as the offset voltage. Meanwhile the working voltages above the critical voltage were applied to the process in a specific period of time to produce single sparks. The signatures of the single sparks on the workpiece surface were used to determine the characteristics of the plasma channel. According to the results, the average diameter of 260 µm was achieved for the plasma channel in the glass machining conditions. This paper also reports a thermophysical model for material removal in ECDM process based on the finite element method (FEM) and plasma channel diameter achieved in this study. The amount of the removed material as well as the diameter and depth of the crater, achieved by the FEM, was measured and compared with the experimental outcomes. The results demonstrate the consistency of the proposed model with the experimental observations.