Modern process energy sources for electrical discharge machining (EDM)

摘要

In this paper, different concepts of process energy sources for electro-erosive machining are presented. The evolution of the process energy sources and the possibilities of its control for attaining a stable process are described. The most important high-quality feature of an EDM process control is the complete avoidance of process degeneracy and a maximum number of removal-effective pulses. The modern semiconductor technology makes possible a high variety of the pulse shape modifications. As a result, the number of the parameters to be influenced by the pulse control is increased essentially. Thus, with one generator concept/process control many applications can be processed successfully. Different types of process energy sources like relaxation generators, static pulse generators, and needle pulse generators can be assigned to a special application and a special machining process (sinking, cutting, micro machining, roughing, finishing,...). For several examples, the characteristic differences are shown and the limits of machining are determined. A special group of process energy sources is designed for combined methods and, therefore, the parameters have great variability. The combination EDM/ECM represents an extreme demand.