Experiments of Ti6Al4V manufactured by low-speed wire cut electrical discharge machining and electrical parameters optimization

Abstract Titanium alloy Ti6Al4V is widely used in aerospace, shipbuilding, petrochemical, and other industrial fields. Low-speed wire-cut electrical discharge machining (LS-WEDM) has the advantage of high machining accuracy. However, there are few research studies on the comprehensive effects of the electrical parameters of TC4 (Ti6Al4V) made by LS-WEDM on the machining surface. This paper focuses on LS-WEDM machining of titanium alloy TC4 and investigates the effects of electrical parameters on the surface roughness, kerf width, and cutting speed of TC4 specimens based on orthogonal tests. Five electrical parameters are optimized using the grey correlation method and the response surface method. The surface roughness of 1.744 μm, the kerf width of 215.432 μm, and the cutting speed of 24.759 mm 2 ·min −1 are found to be the best process indicators, with errors of 3.3, 3.2, and 12.5% compared with the predicted values. The optimized results show that the surface roughness value is reduced by 50.9%, the kerf width is reduced by 29.4%, and the cutting speed is increased by 23%, which proves the accuracy of the optimized method.