International Journal of Engineering and Technology

Unconventional machining process finds lot of application in aerospace and precision industries. It is preferred over other conventional methods because of the advent of composite and high strength to weight ratio materials, complex parts and also because of its high accuracy and precision. Usually in unconventional machine tools, trial and error method is used to fix the values of process parameters which increase the production time and material wastage. A mathematical model functionally relating process parameters and operating parameters of a wire cut electric discharge machine (WEDM) is developed incorporating Artificial neural network (ANN) and the work piece material is SKD11 tool steel. This is accomplished by training a feed forward neural network with back propagation learning Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm. The required data used for training and testing the ANN are obtained by conducting trial runs in wire cut electric discharge machine in a small scale industry from South India. The programs for training and testing the neural network are developed, using matlab 7.0.1 package. In this work, we have considered the parameters such as thickness, time and wear as the input values and from that the values of the process parameters are related and a algorithm is arrived. Hence, the proposed algorithm reduces the time taken by trial runs to set the input process parameters of WEDM and thus reduces the production time along with reduction in material wastage. Thus the cost of machining processes is reduced and thereby increases the overall productivity.