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Electrical discharge machining is one of the main methods of manufacturing technological equipment used in the foundry industry, plastics processing, plastic working, etc. Important elements determining its quality are, apart from the properties of the materials used, the features imparted in the manufacturing processes. The paper presents a brief study of electro-discharge alloying process of surface with using rod vibrating electrode. It is also economically justified to use EDM (Electrical Discharge Machining) to produce machine parts from materials that are easily machined, but with very complex geometry, and therefore difficult and labor-intensive to produce using conventional methods. Spark discharges are created between the working electrode and the workpiece, the entire process takes place in a working medium with dielectric properties. As a result of the local increase in temperature, melting and partial evaporation of the microvolume of the material occurs. The main factors influencing the formation of the surface layer in the process of its modification are the melting process, diffusion processes, rapid heating and cooling of the material, phase transitions and changes in the structure of the layers adjacent to the crater formation site. In the tested process, the modified surface layer with improved properties reached a thickness of up to 90 micrometers, and the material resolidified on the surface of the workpiece contains about 50% of alloying elements. The geometric structure of the surface resulting from the modification is similar to that obtained by EDM. The distribution of inequality vertices is random. For typical machining conditions, the obtained roughness Sa is approximately 3.5 µm.
Keywords: Electrical discharge machining (EDM), alloying, surface layer, roughness© This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.