A New Method of Investigation the Characteristic of the Heat Flux of EDM Plasma

Abstract The EDM process, which was generally accepted as a thermal process, was significantly affected by the characteristic of the heat flux of the EDM plasma. Different type of heat sources have been proposed by many researchers to investigate the EDM process by simulating the temperature distribution in the electrodes based on the thermo physical mod els. However, there exists a great difference between different types of heat sources. In this paper, a new method of investigation the characteristic of EDM plasma was proposed. The heat flux of the plasma was investigated by comparing the boundary of the melted material in the crater which was obtained by metallographic method and the isothermal surface of the thermal-physical model calculated by finite element method (FEM). The results indicated that the Gauss heat source was much more consistent with the actual EDM process compared with the other heat source type, such as point heat source, circular heat source. T he data proposed in this paper can be further used in the existing thermo physical models, expecting to bring the models preciously more close to the actual case.