Influence of nozzle jet flushing on wire breakage in 1st-cut wire edm from start hole

In wire EDM (electrical discharge machining) process, it is important to smoothly exclude debris and bubbles generated in the working gap for keeping stable performance. Much debris stagnation in the gap would cause frequent occurrence of discharge concentration and secondary discharge, which results in unstable machining performance, such as frequent wire breakage, low removal rate, and low shape accuracy. Therefore, a jet flushing of working fluid using upper and lower jet nozzles has been conventionally applied for excluding the debris and bubbles from the machined kerf. Nevertheless, it is well known that the wire often breaks when the machined kerf length is a few mm from the start hole in 1st-cut wire EDM. The influence of machined kerf length on the flow field, the debris exclusion, and the wire behavior caused with hydrodynamic force by the jet flushing should be made clear. In this study, variations of flow field in the kerf, the debris accumulation state and the wire deflection caused jet flushing with machined length were analytically investigated by CFD (computational fluid dynamics) and structural analysis when 1st-cut wire EDM was done from a small start hole. Moreover, the effects of machined kerf length on the wire deflection and wire breakage were discussed. Wire breakage frequency experiments showed that wire tended to frequently break at a certain machined kerf length, where the wire deflection rapidly increased and the debris residence time in the gap became long.