ECM or Electrochemical Machining, is a rapid, highly cost effective surface treatment process that eliminates heat and mechanical stress during machining, the process follows Faraday’s law of electrolysis, known as the law of induction where the amount of material removed is proportional to the time and electrical current flowing between the tool and the work piece through an electrolyte solution.
As the electrolyte solution is pumped over or through the work piece a current is passed between the tool and work piece causing material to be removed from the work piece surface, this electrolytic dissolution of the material is controlled by shaping the tool to achieve the desired contour in the work piece surface. Find out more about how ECM is used for aerospace surface treatment.
The unique advantage of electrochemical surface treatment is the ability to solve production manufacturing problems that are either too expensive, time consuming or impossible by conventional or traditional methods, such as:
- Deburring and/or radiusing internal or external edges and intersections
- Creating internal cavities and contours
- Polishing internal and external surfaces to near mirror finishes
- Machining extremely hard materials with virtually no tool wear
- Machining without causing surface stress
- Forming internal chambers and transfer ports
- Drilling internal holes into cavities with no burr creation
Since the tooling in electrochemical surface treatment, known as the Cathode, does not come into contact with the workpiece there is virtually no tool wear in the process, typical deburring and polishing times are extremely fast; 10-30 seconds for most applications and the process can be applied to small volumes and large equally well with scalability up to I part per 5 seconds.
Electrochemical Surface Treatment is known under a few acronyms which are essentially the same process but applied uniquely to achieve differing objectives:
ECM – Electrochemical Machining is the machining of contours, cavities, edge geometries, round and unique shaped holes, channels, internal helixes etc that cannot be produced by conventional machining. More.....
ECD - Electrochemical Deburring is the deburring of internal or external features such as cross hole intersections, hole into bore breakthroughs, multiple hole intersections, these edges can also have radiuses produced as part of the process. More....
PECM – Precision Electrochemical Machining is the new high accuracy development of Electrochemical technology also known as Micro ECM or uECM, by using an alternating pulse current and oscillating the tool, it is possible to mimic the EDM sinking process but without the disadvantages of tool wear, recast layer and poor surface finish, the PECM process can produce highly accurate parts and features down to micro levels, burr free and up to mirror finishes giving the ability to replace multiple process steps with one process. More....
ECG – Electrochemical Grinding