Research On Tool Wear Compensation In Micro-EDM

Micro-electro-discharge machining (Micro-EDM) has become one of the most important branches in the field of micro machining and receives worldwide attention. As electrode wear in micro-EDM significantly deteriorates the machining accuracy the electrode wear must be compensated in process to improve the geometric accuracy of the product. In this study, a compensation method for a Micro-EDM process using discharge pulse counting is proposed to compensate the electrode wear in Micro-EDM.The method is based on the proportional relationship between the electrode wear and the number of discharge pulses. As the electrode was wore by every pulse is fixed in certain situation, discharge pulse counting can indicate the electrode wear. This paper mainly includes the following:The PCB (Printed Circuit Board ) based on CPLD ( Complex Programmable Logic Device ) , and the control program based on PMAC(Programmable Multi-Axis Controller) was designed and programmed to validate the method. The compensation experiment result confirms this method can compensate the electrode wear effectively. The ANN (Artificial Neutral Networks) method was studied to valid the feasibility in the compensation system, and the ANN method prove its feasibility in real time and lay a foundation for the use of neural network to improve the effective pulse counting electrode wear forecast in the future.