Developing Spiral-Conical Gears for Microsystems by Wire-Assisted Electrical Discharge Machining

The requirements of gears are increasing rapidly in the global market for applications from micro electro mechanical systems (MEMS) to aerospace. Gears of various profiles and types including spiral-conical are used for motion as well as torque transfer in microsystems. The development of such gears is a challenging task because no compromise in their quality is acceptable. It necessitates highly accurate gear manufacturing process. This article presents such a process i.e. wire-assisted electrical discharge machining (WEDM) and development of stainless-steel made spiral-conical gears of miniature size. All minute aspects of spiral-conical gear development by WEDM are reported in this paper. In order to investigate the impact of process parameters and gear quality, an experimental study has been conducted based on Taguchi’s robust design of experiment technique. The developed gears are found with good manufacturing quality characteristics.