EXPERIMENTAL MODELING OF ABREX MATERIAL USING MULTIPLE REGRESSION ANALYSIS IN PLASMA ARC CUTTING PROCESS (original) (raw)

Plasma arc cutting process is widely used in metal cutting industries and modern fabrication units. Precise cutting of high strength material is still a challenging task to the industries. This process involves thermal cutting phenomena. Abrex is a high strength and high abrasion resistant material which is used in manufacturing of body parts of dump truck, buckets, barges, front loaders etc. This special alloy material is identified as " hard-to-cut " type materials. Cutting of this material create a heavy challenge in order to meet the quality. Therefore, optimization and selection of optimal process parameter plays a vital role in cutting such type of material using plasma arc cutting process. This present work proposes an experimental investigation of plasma arc cutting process of abrex high strength material. Experiments were conducted based on Taguchi's L9 orthogonal array design. The cutting parameters analysed were arc current, stand-off distance and cutting speed whereas material removal rate, kerf and dross were selected as output responses. Also, a prediction model was developed to estimate the responses using multiple regression analysis. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) and analysis of means (ANOM) were used to verify the effect of each parameter on the surface quality to be assessed. INTRODUCTION In 1950, plasma arc cutting machine was introduced in fabrication unit to cut the steel and aluminum materials. Modern fabrication units have greater flexibility to adopt an advance or special materials. In this era, cutting the materials with higher accuracy, reduced time and better quality product is a challenging tasks to manufacturing sectors. There is a lot of cutting process to cut the materials, but plasma arc cutting process is quietly economic process comparing to other. Plasma is a forth state of matter. Solid, liquid, gaseous and plasma are the matters. While excess heating of gaseous medium, it acts like a plasma. It is highly energized in nature and electrically conductive medium [1]. Plasma arc cutting is a thermal cutting process which involves high energized plasma gas to cut the high strength material. While cutting process, high velocity ionized plasma gas is impinges to the workpiece through the nozzle. The arc generates between the nozzle and work material. The temperature around the arc gap reaches to 20,0000C. By this process, the workpiece gets melted and blown away by the help of pressure of high velocity plasma jet [2]. A combination of response surface methodology coupled with grey relational analysis and principal component analysis was introduced to find the optimization of plasma arc cutting process of AISI 304L stainless steel [3]. The responses were measured as material removal rate, dross, chamfer, kerf and surface roughness. Experimental modeling was established using general regression analysis and ANOVA while machining of Ti-6Al-4V titanium alloy [4]. Parametric optimization of plasma arc cutting process of stainless steel 304L obtained using grey-Taguchi based response surface methodology [5]. Taguchi's optimization technique is used to find the optimum condition of plasma arc cutting process of 1017 steel and Taguchi's L27 orthogonal array utilized to outline the design [6]. Desirability function and response surface methodology are applied to optimize automated plasma arc cutting process [7].