Investigating the Surface Characteristics of Complex Geometrical Features on Ti-6Al-4V Alloy Processed through WEDM

Abstract The present study focuses on producing an interface at micro- and nano-level on complex curved and plane features of Ti-6Al-4V (α + β) alloy through wire electric discharge machining (WEDM) which simultaneously does machining and surface modification. The process parameters such as servo voltage, pulse on-time, pulse off-time and wire speed are used as input controls to comprehend the surface attributes of complex curved features at different scales. A thorough statistical, parametric, surface integrity, modified layer, layer hardening, surface porosity and surface spectroscopical analyses are carried out for a comprehensive evaluation of surface properties. Multi-attribute optimization resulted in optimized process settings S V (70 V), P off (40 μs), P on (8 μs) and W S (6 mm/s) achieving 75.51% combined desirability of both responses. The predicted and experimental results are validated under a 95% confidence interval showing less than 5% error. The optimized parametric conditions show 3.58 μm surface roughness on curved features and 3.27 μm on plane features.