STATISTICAL MODELING AND OPTIMIZATION OF SURFACE ROUGHNESS IN WIRE EDM OF NONCIRCULAR GEARS MADE OF SKD11 STEEL

This study presents the statistical modeling and optimization of surface roughness in wire EDM of SKD11 noncircular gears. A Taguchi L9 design was employed to evaluate the effects of discharge current (I), feed rate (F), and wire winding speed (V). ANOVA results indicated that discharge current had the greatest influence (58.68%), followed by feed rate (31.95%) and wire winding speed (9.37%). A quadratic model developed using Response Surface Methodology (RSM) showed excellent accuracy (R² > 0.99). Surface roughness increased monotonically with higher parameter levels due to thermal effects. The optimized parameter combination significantly reduced surface roughness, confirming the effectiveness of the proposed statistical approach for precision gear manufacturing by WEDM.