Electrochemical machining analysis on grid cathode composed of square cells

During the electrochemical machining (ECM), the cathodes designed by the existing methods are mainly unitary cathodes, which can be only used to produce the workpieces with the same shapes. However, there are few researches on designing cathodes for machining the different workpieces with the different surfaces. This paper presents the grid cathode composed of the square cells to produce the workpieces with different shapes. Three types of the square cells, 2.5 mm×2.5 mm, 3 mm×3 mm, and 4 mm×4 mm, are utilized to construct the plane, the slant, and the blade cathode. The material of the cathode and the anode is CrNi₁₈Ti₉, and the ingredient of electrolyte is 15% NaCl and 15% NaNO₃. The machining equilibrium machining current and time are acquired and analyzed, the machining process and the workpiece quality are compared between using the grid cathode and the unitary cathode. Moreover, the machining errors on the workpiece surface are measured and analyzed, and the error reasons are traced and discussed to obtain the better surface quality of the workpiece. The experiment and analysis results show that the grid cathode can be used to manufacture the workpieces with complex shapes in certain range of the error. The workpiece quality improves with the size of the square cell being reduced, and if the square element is small enough, the workpiece quality is almost equal to the one machined by the unitary cathode. The proposed research realizes a single cathode machining the different workpieces with the different surfaces.