Journal of The Japan Society of Electrical Machining Engineers

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Electroplating is used, for example, for corrosion protection, surface hardening, and metal thin-film manufacturing. In conventional electroplating, the workpiece is immersed in the plating solution, and the whole contact surface is plated. Therefore, the mask operation and the removal of unnecessary plating film are needed for local plating in cases such as ornament plating. However, these additional processes would lead to a substantial increase in processing time and cost. In this research, an approach to realizing local electroplating by using a suction tool, with which the electrolyte is confined in the area between the tool electrode and workpiece, was carried out and the influence of machining conditions on the plating characteristics was investigated. The experimental results show that the maskless local electroplating can be performed, and the influences of the tool material, current density and the scanning speed were clarified. The plating of patterns such as characters is possible with the proposed method.

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It has been established that the formation of an electrically conductive layer on an insulator is a precondition for electrical discharge machining of insulating ceramics by an assisting electrode method. However, the details of the formation mechanism of the electrically conductive layer are not well understood. In this paper, the morphology and components of the machined surface layer are analyzed under different machining conditions of electrode moving speed and voltage threshold for discharge detection. We describe an idea for the formation mechanism of the electrically conductive layer in the machining of insulating Si₃N₄ machining by using a machine tool made especially for our experiments.

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