Influence of additive materials on the roughness of AISI D2 steel in electrical discharge machining (EDM) environment

The quality of the machined surface resulted from the electrical discharge machining (EDM) environment is not efficient according to the previous studies. One of the significant problems is the impedance of dielectric fluid, where it is contributing to focusing the plasma channel in a limited area. Hence, this behavior leads to appearing deep craters on the machined zone. The researchers have attempted to enhance the average of surface roughness by employing powder particles or surfactant as the additive materials in the dielectric fluid. Unfortunately, these studies did not present a comparison between these additive materials in this environment. Therefore, the present study aims to compare the performance of the average of surface roughness (R_a) for AISI D2 steel by utilizing Nano chromium powder (NCP) and Span-20. The present work has proved that the behavior of the average of surface roughness for this steel is dropping at the maximum level of Nano chromium powder concentration and pulse duration as compared to the behavior with the Span-20. Moreover, the best roughness was produced by this steel with Nano chromium powder at 2 g/L and 20 μs for this powder and the pulse duration.