Investigation of surface roughness and material removal rate for high speed micro end milling on PMMA

Micro end milling is one of the most important micromachining process and widely used for producing miniaturized components with high accuracy and surface finish. This paper present the influence of three micro end milling process parameters; spindle speed, feed rate, and depth of cut on surface roughness (Ra) and material removal rate (MRR). The machining was performed using multi-process micro machine tools (DT-110 Mikrotools Inc., Singapore) with poly methyl methacrylate (PMMA) as the workpiece and tungsten carbide as its tool. To develop the mathematical model for the responses in high speed micro end milling machining, Taguchi design has been used to design the experiment by using the orthogonal array of three levels L18 (21×37). The developed models were used for multiple response optimizations by desirability function approach to obtain minimum Ra and maximum MRR. The optimized values of Ra and MRR were 128.24 nm, and 0.0463 mg/min, respectively obtained at spindle speed of 30000 rpm, feed rate of 2.65 mm/min, and depth of cut of 40 μm. The analysis of variance revealed that spindle speeds are the most influential parameters on Ra. The optimization of MRR is mostly influence by feed ra