Breaking Down Dielectric Breakdown

Liquid dielectric used in electrical discharge machining serves a few purposes: to flush eroded material away from the workpiece, to cool the electrode and workpiece, and to minimize spark gap size. The mechanisms by which liquid dielectric flushes and cools are fairly obvious. How the spark gap is minimized by the dielectric is a bit […]

Superalloys and EDM

One characteristic that separates electrical discharge machining from more conventional machining methods is its ability to drill through materials that are very resilient with great efficiency. Though many of these materials are elements such as tantalum and niobium, most are elemental mixtures called superalloys. These superalloys generally share a face-centered cubic crystal structure, a structure […]