Performance study of electrochemical micromachining using square composite electrode for copper

The use of micro components is increasing day by day in the industries such as aviation, power circuit boards, inkjet nozzle and biomedical. Among various non-traditional micromachining methods, electrochemical micromachining (EMM) shows unique characteristics such as no tool wear, no residual stress and high accuracy. In this research EMM is considered to study the effect of square shaped stainless steel (SS) and aluminum metal matrix composite (AMC) tool on square hole generation. The significant process parameters such as machining voltage, duty cycle and aqueous sodium nitrate (NaNO3) electrolyte of varying concentration is considered for the study. The performances of EMM process are evaluated in terms of machining rate (MR) and Overcut (OC). The AMC tool shows 43.22 % lesser OC than the SS tool at the parameter combinations of 8V, 85% and 23 g/l. Also, for the same parameter combination MR for SS tool is 71.6 % higher than the AMC tool. Field emission scanning electron microscope image (FESEM) analysis shows that the micro square hole generated using composite electrode shows micro-pits on the circumference of the square hole. The energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDAX) analysis is conducted to verify presence and distributions of reinforcement in AMC tool.