Abstract: In order to understand the mechanism of WEDM (Wire electrical discharge machining) and find out the influence of machining parameters on the accuracy, a simulation system for WEDM is developed., which can accurately reproduce the dis-charge phenomena of WEDM machining on computer through searching for the discharge location, removing the workpiece and analyzing wire vibration. To verify the feasibility of the simulation system, the simulation results are compared with the experimental results. In order to obtain the 3D data of the discharge gap and workpiece shape from the experimental results, a new measurement is proposed. By comparing the simulation results and experimental results, it is found that the simulation method is feasible. The results show that the ma-chined shape obtained from the simulation is almost consistent with the machined shape obtained from the experiments when the wire tension and servo voltage are adjusted; whether the machined shape along machining direction is convex feature or concave feature depends on the relative value between the ex-plosive force and electrostatic force.

Key words: Discharger location, First cut, Simulation, WEDM