USE OF BOUNDARY ELEMENT METHOD FOR THE DETERMINATION OF TOOL SHAPE IN ELECTROCHEMICAL MACHINING

The problem of cathode shape determination for a given anode shape in electrochemical machining is considered. An algorithm based on the boundary integral equation technique and non-linear optimization for this inverse problem is developed. The additional flux condition at the anode is used as the constraint in this ill-posed problem. Through an iterative process, the shape of the cathode is determined by minimizing a functional. The algorithm is tested on two examples. It is shown that the algorithm is consistently superior compared to published numerical techniques based on the embedding method or the method of lines.