Experimental Investigation on Effects of Wire Electro Discharge Machining of Ti50Ni45Co5 Shape Memory Alloys

TiNiCo shape memory alloy is most popular shape memory alloy for biomedical applications due to their outstanding properties such as shape memory effect, pseudoelasticity and transformation temperature. Machining of such kind of alloys is very difficult through conventional machining process is very difficult because they may affect their internal properties of these alloys. However conventional machining processes give poor surface quality during the machining hence non-conventional machining processes such as (wire electro discharge machining, water jet machining and electro discharge machining etc.) are more suitable for machining of such kind of alloy. From the literature it has been found that Wire electro discharge machining (WEDM) is more suitable non-conventional machining process for such kind of alloy. Present study exhibits the effects WEDM characteristics of Ti50Ni45Co5 shape memory alloy. L-9 orthogonal array has been created by using Taguchi as a design method for machining of selected alloy and machined surface characterization has been carried out at the optimized process parameters with respect to microstructures, surface topography, microhardness, XRD analysis and residual stresses. To find the optimum setting of the input process parameters a couple of optimization techniques are used, namely principal component analysis (PCA) and Gray relational analysis (GRA) technique. 125s pulse on time (T-on), 35s pulse off time (T-off) and 40V servo voltage (SV) were found as an optimal setting for the higher material removal rate (MRR) with better surface roughness (SR) in the present study. Moreover, characterization of the machined surface is performed with respect to microstructures, surface topography, microhardness analysis, XRD and residual stresses. Harder surface observed near the cutting edge and TiNio(3) Tio(2) and CuZn were noticed on the surface of machined component through XRD analysis. However, compressive residual stress has been noticed on the machined surface during WEDM process.