An experimental study for evaluating speed parameters on surface roughness of LS-WEDT and its application in fabricating microelectrodes

The demand for microelectrodes has greatly increased when the micromachining techniques have become a hot issue in modern industry. The non-contact of EDM process makes it have the unique superiority in fabricating microelectrodes. Therefore, this paper proposed a low speed wire electrical discharge turning (LS-WEDT) method to fabricate microelectrodes. Firstly, the influence of speed parameters including the rotated speed (Vn), feeding speed (Vs) and wire speed (Vw) involved in LS-WEDT are discussed. More importantly, the microelectrode made of CuW70 material with diameter of 58 μm is firstly and successfully fabricated by LS-WEDT. Furthermore, the scanning electron microscope observations disclosed that the microelectrode has good surface quality and high machining precision without ridges and bending. Besides, many small micro-voids with the diameter less than 1 μm can be observed on the microelectrode surface. Finally, the energy dispersive spectrograph analysis suggested the presence of foreign elements including zinc and oxygen on the microelectrode surface machined by LS-WEDT.