Study on electrochemical discharge machining of small holes array on glass with ultrasonic vibrating tube electrode

Electrochemical discharge machining (ECDM), as a new type of non-traditional machining method, is widely used in the machining of insulating hard and brittle materials such as glass and ceramics. However, there are some problems such as difficulty in circulating electrolyte, resulting in poor quality machining of deep and small holes. In this paper, electrochemical discharge machining with ultrasonic vibration and tube electrode is used to improve the flow field in the machining gap and enhance the machining quality by using the injected electrolyte inside the tube electrode and ultrasonic vibration. First, the temperature distribution state of electrochemical discharge is simulated, and the influence of the coupling effect of the electrolyte injection and ultrasonic vibration on the machining gap is analyzed. And then, the influence weights of each factor were analyzed by orthogonal experiments and further analyzed to obtain the optimized combination of machining parameters, which reduced the entrance size of small holes by 19.3%, increased the machining depth by 18.5% and increased the depth-to-diameter ratio by 46.2% compared with the traditional ECDM. The effect of ultrasonic vibration was studied on the basis of the optimized machining parameters. The results show that the optimized effect of ultrasonic vibration with an amplitude of 7μm is most obvious under the conditions of low pressure and low injection rate. Finally, with the optimized machining parameters, a 5×5 array of small holes and three deep and small holes were machined, demonstrating that electrochemical discharge machining with ultrasonic vibrating tube electrode can be an efficient and high-quality method for machining small holes.