Experimental Investigations of Wirecut-EDM on Material Removal Rate and Surface Roughness of Magnesium Alloy AZ80

Magnesium alloys, especially AZ80, are of great interest in the aerospace, automotive, and biomedical sectors because of their superior strength-to-weight ratio, corrosion resistance, and biocompatibility. Despite this, AZ80 is very difficult to machine due to its low melting point, high thermal conductivity, and reactivity, which result in problems such as poor surface finish, high tool wear, and even fire risks during traditional machining operations. To overcome these challenges, the noncontact machining process, W-EDM machining, is being researched more extensively for the accurate machining of magnesium alloys. In this investigation, the impact of WEDM process parameters on the machinability of magnesium alloy AZ80 was explored. Parameters such as [Formula: see text], [Formula: see text], wire tension, [Formula: see text], and [Formula: see text] were focused on optimizing the MRR, SR (Ra). Experiments were carried out on an ECO 35 CNC W-EDM to understand how these parameters affect the thermal and mechanical factors of the machining process. Due to the high thermal conductivity and low melting point of AZ80, undue heat may cause microstructural changes and defects such as recast layers and thermal cracks, and therefore, control of the process parameters is of utmost importance. Early experiments indicate that increased discharge energy, preferably obtained with longer [Formula: see text] and increased [Formula: see text], produces increased MRR but at the cost of surface quality. A greater pulse-off-time, on the other hand, enhances the effective flushing of chips from the machining area, which reduces wire breakage and enhances surface finish. It is found from the results that an optimum [Formula: see text] as medium and optimized pulse-off-time lead to a good trade-off between the MRR and surface quality with acceptable surface roughness (Ra) of [Formula: see text]m. The experimentation revealed that the optimal combination of pulse on time of 110 [Formula: see text]s, pulse off time of 50 [Formula: see text]s, current of 3 A, and voltage of 80 V resulted in a minimum Surface Roughness (SR) of 2.11 [Formula: see text]m and a maximum Material Removal Rate (MRR) of 8.47 mm 3 /min. The Taguchi L9 orthogonal array and grey relational analysis successfully identified the dominant parameters, with pulse on time having the highest influence on both SR and MRR.