Fibre Bragg Grating Sensors for Measuring Spark Gap in Micro-EDM in Real-Time

Abstract

In the phase of Industry 4.0 (I.4) technology, miniaturization has paved the foundation of the smart manufacturing sector and the micromachining processes can be considered as the front end of the I.4 technologies. Micro-Electric Discharge Machining (Micro-EDM) has been considered the most promising micromachining technology for fabrication of microfeatures irrespective to hard and temperature resistive materials. The process characteristics in Micro-EDM is very stochastic in nature, and understanding the proper process characteristics with digitization of data to predict the process for improved capabilities is highly required in this era of Industry 4.0 revolution. The spark discharge between the anode and cathode is envisaged to be very small gap (~10μm) and also an essential parameter for machining performance, but measurement of spark gap of Micro-EDM in realtime is a great challenge. This present work is based on measurement of spark gap with a novel sensing technique based on Fiber Bragg Grating (FBG).