The machining of composite materials has been an area of intense research for the past couple of decades due to its wide range of applications, from automobiles to air crafts or from boats to nuclear systems. Non-conventional machining, especially electric discharge machining (EDM), is found to be a good machining option for meeting the required outputs. To overcome the challenges of machining complex shapes, wire electric discharge machining (WEDM) was developed. Al6351 composites was observed to be extensively used in nuclear applications. Therefore, identifying the kerf width and surface roughness are important criteria for the dimensional accuracy of the final product. The present work aims at predicting the behavior of the two major machining parameters which are kerf width and surface roughness of Al6351 composites in wire EDM by creating a mathematical model using ANOVA for different combinations of the reinforcements and comparing the variations in the coefficients for different combinations of reinforcements. The developed model has been validated by conducting similar set of experiments in Al6351-5% SiC-1% B4C hybrid composite. From the work, it was identified that pulse on time and current are the major contributing factor for kerf width and wire feed rate was observed to be contributing to the surface roughness. The validation results show an average variation of 8.17% for kerf width and 11.27% for surface roughness. The work can be successfully utilized for prediction of the kerf width and surface roughness of the composites manufactured with Al6351 as the base matrix material.

This work aims to identify the pattern for the major output parameters, material removal rate (MRR) and surface roughness (Ra) of different combinations of Al6061-based composites. Based on the verification carried out on these patterns using analysis of variance (ANOVA) as the mathematical tool, the work predicts the mentioned output characteristics while machining Al6061 composites of different material compositions based on their hardness values. ANOVA was employed for the generation of equations of the particular composite. The equations were compared for the coefficients of each parameter employed in ANOVA. The work was carried out comparing the characteristic equation of different combinations of Al6061-based composite. The results indicate that the coefficients of the current show a drastic variation when compared to other coefficients for both the output parameters. It was observed that the current and its coefficients contribute to the output parameters based on the variation in hardness. For surface roughness, the constant of the characteristic equation was also found to influence the parameter for the change in hardness. The equation derived for both material removal rate (MRR) and surface roughness (Ra) were identified to be matching with the experimental result carried out for validation. The average variation observed was 9.3% for MRR and 7.2% for surface roughness.