Performance Analysis of Vegetable Oil as Dielectric Fluid in Electric Discharge Machining Process of Inconel 800

Electric discharge machining (EDM) is a spark erosion process widely used to machine difficult-to-cut material by conventional machining method. The major elements of EDM process are work piece, electrode and dielectric fluid. In this work, an attempt is made to investigate vegetable oil as dielectric fluid and their process performance for machining of Inconel 800 in EDM process. The effects of dielectric fluids are investigated with vegetable oils and conventional dielectric fluid namely Sunflower oil and Kerosene respectively. The important input variables considered in this study are pulse on/off time, current and voltage. Three levels of energy setting are employed for machining with selected dielectric fluids. The output parameters are considered tool wear rate (TWR), material removal rate (MRR) and surface roughness (SR). In the present study effect of vegetable oil as dielectric fluid and the results are compared with conventional dielectric fluid. The result revealed that vegetable oils are successfully employed as dielectric fluids and they are having similar dielectric properties and erosion mechanism compared to conventional dielectric fluid. This proposed vegetable oil based dielectric fluids showed higher MRR than conventional dielectric. It shows vegetable oils have similar dielectric properties compared with conventional dielectric and it is possible to replace as dielectric fluid in EDM process.

Performance Evaluation of Vegetable Oil-Based Nano-Cutting Fluids in Environmentally Friendly Machining of Inconel-800 Alloy

Recently, the application of nano-cutting fluids has gained much attention in the machining of nickel-based super alloys due their good lubricating/cooling properties including thermal conductivity, viscosity, and tribological characteristics. In this study, a set of turning experiments on new nickel-based alloy i.e., Inconel-800 alloy, was performed to explore the characteristics of different nano-cutting fluids (aluminum oxide (Al2O3), molybdenum disulfide (MoS2), and graphite) under minimum quantity lubrication (MQL) conditions. The performance of each nano-cutting fluid was deliberated in terms of machining characteristics such as surface roughness, cutting forces, and tool wear. Further, the data generated through experiments were statistically examined through Box Cox transformation, normal probability plots, and analysis of variance (ANOVA) tests. Then, an in-depth analysis of each process parameter was conducted through line plots and the results were compared with the existing literature. In the end, the composite desirability approach (CDA) was successfully implemented to determine the ideal machining parameters under different nano-cutting cooling conditions. The results demonstrate that the MoS2 and graphite-based nanofluids give promising results at high cutting speed values, but the overall performance of graphite-based nanofluids is better in terms of good lubrication and cooling properties. It is worth mentioning that the presence of small quantities of graphite in vegetable oil significantly improves the machining characteristics of Inconel-800 alloy as compared with the two other nanofluids.