A Study of Electrode Parameters in Electric Discharged Machine (EDM) Affecting the Obtained Titanium Carbide Nanoparticles

Nanomaterials are getting more attention in many industries today because the potential of nanomaterials can be widely used. Various materials can be exploited in the form of nanoparticles, including titanium nanoparticles that can be used in many applications. One of the popular processes for cutting metal is electrical discharge machining (EDM) is a no-contact machining process between the electrode and the workpiece. There is no force in cutting and no stress in the workpiece. It is interesting that in the cutting process by EDM, the materials that are produced are on the nanoscale. From the opened literature, some reports have studied the fabrication of titanium nanoparticles by EDM and using oil as a dielectric fluid and the nanoparticles obtained are titanium carbide. There is no information on how can we adjust or control the process to produce titanium carbide nanomaterials. Therefore, this work was done to study some variables in the EDM electrode that affect the nanoparticle production process, e.g. time spent in milling, different electrode cross-sectional diameters, and types of electrodes. The electrode wear after milling was also studied by surface roughness testing with a microscopic examination of the surface of the electrode. After that, the obtained nanoparticles were examined for their morphologies, chemical compositions, and crystal structures by scanning electron microscopy (SEM), energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS), and X-Ray diffraction analysis (XRD), respectively.