Generation and Characterization of Borosilicate Glass Nanoparticles using in-House Developed μ-ECDM Setup

Micro-Electro Chemical Discharge Machining (μ-ECDM) has proved its potential to generate features, structures, and textures on various engineering materials, particularly glass. Researchers have recently explored the process of generating conducting nanoparticles but still completely lacks non-conducting nanoparticles like that of glass. However, glass nanoparticles find wide applications as nanofillers, supplementary cementitious material, heat-insulating additives, density reducing agent, catalyst support, etc. The novelty of the present work lies in the generation of borosilicate glass nanoparticles by an in-house developed μ-ECDM setup with a DC motor actuated gear reduction tool feeding mechanism. Experimentation was carried out based on the face-centered central composite design of response surface methodology (FC-CCD-RSM) to obtain an individual, combined effect of parameters, their significance, and contributions by analysis of variance. The contribution was 73.77% of voltage (V) followed by 14.76% concentration (C), and 6.05% duty factor (DF). Parametric combination of 40 V, 20 wt% C, 40% DF resulted in a minimum average diameter (AD) of 46.51 nm as the response. An empirical model is developed to predict the desired parametric combination responses with a 5.63% average error.