Performance Analysis of Vegetable Oil as Dielectric Fluid in Electric Discharge Machining Process of Inconel 800

Abstract

Electric discharge machining (EDM) is a spark erosion process widely used to machine difficult-to-cut material by conventional machining method. The major elements of EDM process are work piece, electrode and dielectric fluid. In this work, an attempt is made to investigate vegetable oil as dielectric fluid and their process performance for machining of Inconel 800 in EDM process. The effects of dielectric fluids are investigated with vegetable oils and conventional dielectric fluid namely Sunflower oil and Kerosene respectively. The important input variables considered in this study are pulse on/off time, current and voltage. Three levels of energy setting are employed for machining with selected dielectric fluids. The output parameters are considered tool wear rate (TWR), material removal rate (MRR) and surface roughness (SR). In the present study effect of vegetable oil as dielectric fluid and the results are compared with conventional dielectric fluid. The result revealed that vegetable oils are successfully employed as dielectric fluids and they are having similar dielectric properties and erosion mechanism compared to conventional dielectric fluid. This proposed vegetable oil based dielectric fluids showed higher MRR than conventional dielectric. It shows vegetable oils have similar dielectric properties compared with conventional dielectric and it is possible to replace as dielectric fluid in EDM process.