Research On Multi-wire Electrodes In Micro-Electrochemical Machining

Wire electrochemical micromachining(WEMM) is an up-to-date micro machining method, in which process the wire serves as the cathode while the workpiece is removed under the effect of anodic dissolution. By controlling the trajectory of the wire electrode in a two dimensional plane, microstructures with different profiles could be fabricated. WEMM is a non-contact process and the wire electrode is not worn in the machining process, thus the wire electrode in micrometer scale could be introduced for processing microstructures of smaller sizes. Microstructures with complex shapes and sizes down to several micrometers have been manufactured by combining WEMM and ultrashort voltage pulses. In this paper, WEMM has been implemented with multi-wire electrodes, and following research has been carried out.1. In order to improve the machining efficiency of WEMM, multi-wire electrochemical micro machining(MWEMM) has been introduced to fabricate multi microstructures meanwhile. Mathematical modelling of MWEMM was also established.2. Experimental set-up for WEMM has been developed, which constitutes the motion system, the control system, the monitoring system and the vibration isolation system.3. Experiments were conducted to investigate the effects of the machining voltage, pulse width, pulse period, and feeding rate on the slit width. Furthermore, the influences of the amount of wire electrodes for processing efficiency were also studied.4. By using the optimized processing parameters a group structure with good consistency was successfully fabricated on the cobalt base elasticity alloy workpiece with three wire electrodes.5. WEMM with intermittent withdraw of wire electrode has been proposed to enhance the removing rate of electrolysis out of the inter-electrode gap. The influences of single feeding increment, the intermittent withdraw amplitude/frequency, and the feeding rate within machining process was studied with a series of experiments. The preliminary experiments of WEMM that combines straight reciprocating travelling in micro-amplitude and the intermittent withdraw of wire electrode were carried out, in order to promote the transportation of electrolysis products.