A Study of Added SiC Powder in Kerosene for the Blind Square Hole Machining of CFRP Using Electrical Discharge Machining

Carbon Fiber Reinforced Polymers (CFRPs) have been applied potentially for various application components owing to their lightweight and better mechanical properties. However, the machining of CFRP has been observed to be poor machinability due to the properties of the CFRP composites. Micro-feature fabricating on CFRP macro-component is a challenging task due to the selection of inadequate process parameters and machines. However, micron-level blind square holes are required in CFRPs for proposing the applications of micro-robotics, micro-vibration measurements, and micro-detection of cracking. These square holes produced on CFRP have the difficult task of being machined using the Electrical Discharge Machining (EDM) process. In this research, the effects of concentration of silicon carbide, pulse duration, duty cycle, and current on squareness, hole depth, and surface roughness of CFRPs are analyzed using Electrical Discharge Machining (EDM) with the square copper electrode. The input parameters, the various percentage of concentration of silicon carbide, pulse duration, duty cycle, and current for EDM are selected. The responses, squareness, hole depth, and surface roughness are considered. Also, an electrode wear length and surface defects have been analyzed. The modeling has been performed for selected responses. Additive Ratio Assessment (ARAS) is used for obtaining optimum parameters. The overall analysis found that the silicon carbide concentration and pulse duration are greatly affected all the responses. Also, the square electrodes produced unstable spark phenomena in the EDM process.