An intelligent and automated system for electrical discharge drilling of aerospace alloys: Inconel 718 and Ti-6Al-4V

Electrical discharge hole drilling is a variation of electrical discharge machining (EDM) process, which has been widely used for making starting holes for wire-EDM applications, opening ventilating holes on dies and diesel ejectors and turbine blade cooling holes, etc. In this research work, an automated and intelligent system was developed for EDM hole drilling operations on aerospace alloys, namely Inconel 718 (IN718) and Ti-6Al-4V (Ti64). The developed system can be used to design EDM drilling process such as choosing optimal and/or best drilling parameters (discharge current, pulse-on time, pulse-off time, and capacitance rate). In accordance with this, the EDM process outcomes such as total drilling time, minimum required electrode length, and roughness of the produced surface can also be obtained as system outputs. The input-output interactions have also been achieved via adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference technique that allows designing the drilling operations in an efficient, effective, and reliable way. The developed system has an interactive and visual interface for ease of use.