Multi-objective Optimization of Wire Electrical Discharge Machining Process Parameters for Al5083/7%B4C Composite Using Metaheuristic Techniques

Metal matrix composites have become a vital concern for the modern manufacturing companies due to some of their special properties. The presence of reinforcement makes them difficult in machining operations to achieve industrial requirements. Therefore, it is necessary to optimize the machining process parameters to improve output performance in terms of product quality. The overall performance of the wire electrical discharge machining (WEDM) process is influenced by various parameters, such as pulse-on time, pulse-off time, induced current, and wire-feed. WEDM is one of the non-traditional machining processes. It machines only electrically conducting materials and machines the surfaces by the thermo-electrical process. During machining of composites, material removal rate, cutting speed, and surface roughness have been considered for this research. The relation between the process parameters and the output responses is developed by using linear regression analysis through Minitab-17. The experiments conducted are dependent on Taguchi L-25 orthogonal array. The optimized sets of process parameters are obtained by using teaching and learning-based optimization.