Influence of Flushing Fluid on Discharge Delay time in Wire EDM

Abstract

As it is known that in EDM discharge does not occur immediately after the application of open voltage, there is always a certain discharge delay time. This discharge delay time can reflect the dielectric breakdown strength of the gap between the tool electrode and the workpiece. In this work, the influence of flushing fluid on discharge delay time was selected to do further study. With a series of experiments, the average discharge delay time and Laue plot under each condition were obtained. As the result, it was known that higher flushing speed can make the discharge delay time increase. Furthermore, the computational fluid dynamics model was built and the corresponding simulation was finished for exploring the reason for the occurrence of this phenomenon. This relative analysis is useful to better understand the discharge conditions and at the same time, it can be helpful for improving the configuration of machining parameters in future works.