Wire electrical discharge polishing of additive manufactured metallic components

Additive manufacturing (AM) is a rapidly developing technology in biomedical, aerospace and automobile industries. However, adoption of this technology on a larger production scale remains limited. This is primarily due to the drawbacks of present AM processes associated with achievable dimensional accuracy and surface integrity of the fabricated component. The average surface roughness (Ra) of the component ranges from 3 μm to 10 μm with stair-stepping effects, balling on surfaces resulting in poor dimensional accuracy. Therefore, post-processing methods like abrasive flow finishing, laser polishing, chemical polishing and traditional finish machining is often used to meet the desired surface integrity and accuracy. However, some of these post-processing methods are quite expensive leading to overall increase in the production cost of the component. On the other hand, methods like etching and sand blasting are time consuming and not suitable for component with intricate geometries. In this paper, low energy wire electrical discharge polishing (WEDP) has been employed to achieve the desired surface integrity and finish. Initially, experiments were conducted to analyse the finishing achieved on planer additive manufactured stainless steel (SS316L) specimens. A significant reduction in roughness of maximum 80 % was obtained at various settings for pulse on time and servo voltage. In addition, SEM and EDS analysis were also carried out to study the microstructure and composition after WEDP. From the study, it was found that the WEDP process is a promising method to finish metallic AMed components.