Bulge Error Reduction

Authors

William Thomas Downs, Mississippi State UniversityFollow
Turner Dauma, Mississippi State UniversityFollow
Sterling McGee, Mississippi State UniversityFollow

Files

Description

Wire electrical discharge machine cutting (EDM) offers high precision fabrication methods unseen among other cutting techniques. It involves submerging the subject to be cut in dielectric liquid and using a highly charged carbide wire to remove material across a very small cutting face. Similar to other subtractive manufacturing methods, there is an assumed level of error and imprecision. The most common within the scope of wire EDM cutting is referred to as “bulge error”. This is largely attributed to the relaxation and dispersion of internal stresses within the cut object relaxing and deforming the cutting geometry, exasperated with time and/or length. From previous research, the contour method is used to map and identify residual stresses within a machined specimen across an area of observation. Derived by Hooke’s Law, our analysis serves to map the displacement about our cut faces similar to those in a contour method stress map. Likewise, adequate fixturing of a specimen is a foundational step in the manufacturing process with respect to the desired manufacturing process to reduce machining inaccuracy. The research outlined below serves to justify a fixturing solution of test objects cut by wire EDM. The contour method is used as an expression of the bulge error across these simulations to validate and corroborate the inaccuracy induced amongst the fixture and wire EDM cuts for laboratory use.

Disciplines

Engineering | Mechanical Engineering

College

James Worth Bagley College of Engineering

Department

Department of Mechanical Engineering

Recommended Citation

Downs, William Thomas; Dauma, Turner; and McGee, Sterling, "Bulge Error Reduction" (2022). ME 4233/6233 Fundamentals of FEA. 33.
https://scholarsjunction.msstate.edu/fea/33