A composite cantilever arm for guiding a moving wire in an electrical discharge wire cutting machine

During the wire cutting process, the moving wire is usually supported by a cantilever arm and wire guides. As the traveling speed of the wire has been increased in recent years to improve productivity, vibration of the cantilever arm occurs, reducing the positional accuracy of machining. Therefore, the design and manufacture of a cantilever arm with high dynamic characteristic materials have become important as the machining speed increases. In this work, a cantilever arm for guiding the moving wire was designed and manufactured using carbon fiber epoxy:composite in order to improve the dynamic characteristics of machining, because composite materials have high specific stiffness, high specific strength and high damping capacity. Experiments and finite element analyses were conducted to investigate the effect of the joining length of the steel flanges on the load capacity. The static and dynamic characteristics of the fabricated composite cantilever arm were compared with those of the conventional cast-iron cantilever arm. From the results, it was found that the developed composite cantilever arm had better dynamic characteristics compared to the conventional arm. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.