Study on Block Electrode Discharge Grinding of Micro Rods

Block electrode discharge grinding is an effective approach to produce micro rods. However, it is difficult to fabricate the rods into desired miniature and precision. To solve this problem, the tangential feeding method is proposed to control the finish size of micro rods. With this method, the micro rod is first fed in its radial direction, and then in the tangential direction for an enough distance. The wear of the block electrode decreases gradually from the start to the end, and the wear in the end can be neglected. Experiments indicate that the large capacitance or voltage can obtain high machining speed, while the small ones can gain thin micro rods. Based on this result, the policy of delaminating grinding is adopted to gain enough thin micro rods at a high machining speed. The Φ5µm micro rods can be ground with this method. SEM results show that the relative error of the size control is less than 10%.