Design and Analysis of Hollow Catenoidal Horn Profile for Ultrasonic Machining of Composite Materials

The composite materials Si/AlC, crystal quartz, and ceramic glass are becoming an important part of the present society in many engineering and non-engineering fields. Conventional methods available for machining these materials have many flaws due to which their application on large scale is restricted. A non-conventional process known as ultrasonic machining (USM), can be implemented for machining of these materials effectively. Anyhow machining efficiency of USM greatly depends upon its horn design and therefore in the present study a horn based on a catenoidal profile with aluminum and titanium material for USM was designed and developed by using solid works and ANSYS. Modal and harmonic analysis was done on the horn for computation of various parameters of interest such as resonant frequency, amplitude vibration and equivalent stresses. After the computation of the results, they were analyzed and compared with those available in the literature in terms of stresses and magnification factor for their validation comparison with literature, it was found that an aluminum catenoidal horn shows higher magnification with the least stress magnitude as compared to horns avail-able in the literature and hence can be used in USM as a replacement for existing horns.