An investigation on effects of wire-EDM machining parameters on surface roughness of newly developed DC53 die steel

DC53 is a newly developed cold die steel from Daido Steel, Japan. It is an improvement over the familiar cold die steel SKD11. Because DC53 is a new die steel, only little information is available in literature for its machining characteristics. This paper investigated the effects of machining parameters on surface roughness of wire EDMed DC53 die steel. The investigated machining parameters were pulse-on time, pulse-off time, pulse-peak current, and wire tension. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) technique was used to find out the parameters affecting the surface roughness. Assumptions of ANOVA were discussed and then examined through residual analysis. Quantitative testing methods on residual analysis were employed in place of the typical qualitative testing techniques. Results from ANOVA show that pulse-on time and pulse-peak current are significant variables to surface roughness of wire-EDMed DC53 die steel. The surface roughness of test specimen increased as these two variables increased.