Machinability study of AZ91D alloy using PCM for selective material removal

Photochemical machining (PCM) is one of the advanced manufacturing processes for selective material removal using masking on it. Magnesium (Mg) based AZ91D alloy has good strength and corrosion resistance properties. Thus, AZ91D alloy is nowadays used in different components like household equipment, computer parts, mobile and telephones parts along automobile components. In the present study, the machining of AZ91D alloy is done using the PCM process. Three process parameters of PCM such as etchant temperature, etching time, and etchant concentration are considered in this work. Ferric chloride is used as an etchant in the PCM process. Taguchi mixed-level L₁₆ orthogonal array design is employed to perform the experiments with the PCM process. Response measures such as material removal rate (MRR) and surface roughness (SR) are measured to study the consequence of process parameters on the AZ91D alloy samples. The highest MRR and lowest SR value of 2.95 mg/min and 1.27 µm are achieved respectively for AZ91D alloy using PCM. Moreover, overall evaluation criteria are calculated to take out the optimum machining parameters for the simultaneous optimization of higher MRR and lower SR values.