Investigation on current efficiency in electrochemical machining

Abstract

In electrochemical machining (ECM), it is widely believed that the current efficiency of NaCl is 100% and does not depend on the pulse duration. Moreover, it is also known that the current efficiency of NaNO3 is not 100%. Through the experiments, it was found that the current efficiency of NaNO3 as well as NaCl depended upon the pulse duration and in case of NaCl, it reduced as the pulse duration was shortened. In this study, the reason for the above behavior of the electrolytes is investigated. Simulation was performed considering the ion transport equations and reactions to study the reason of such dependence of current efficiency on various factors like pulse duration, voltage or current applied, flow rate etc.