A study on multi-criteria decision-making in powder mixed electric discharge machining cylindrical shaped parts

In life as well as in engineering, many times, it is necessary to choose the best option among many different options. That will be more difficult when the criteria given for the selection contradict each other. For example, when external cylindrical grinding, the minimum surface roughness requirement necessitates a small depth of cut and feed rate. The material removal rate will be reduced in this case, and this requirement will conflict with the maximum material removal rate requirement. To solve the above problem, a very useful tool is multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM). In this paper, for the first time, MCDM results for powder mixed discharge machining (PMEDM) cylindrical parts of SKD11 tool steel with copper electrodes have been presented. In this work, eighteen experiments with the L18 (16×53) design using the Taguchi method were conducted. Six main input process parameters include the powder concentration, the pulse current, the servo voltage, the pulse on time, and the pulse off time. To select an alternative that simultaneously ensures two criteria including minimum surface roughness (RS) and maximum material removal speed (MRS), four different MCDM methods including MAIRCA (Multi-Attributive Ideal-Real Comparative Analysis), MARCOS (Measurement of Alternatives and Ranking according to Compromise Solution), TOPSIS (Technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution), and EAMR (Area-based Method of Ranking) and two methods of criteria weight calculation including MEREC (Method based on the Removal Effects of Criteria) and Entropy methods were selected. The results of MCDM when PMEDM SKD11 tool steel cylindrical parts with two methods for weight determination and four methods for solving MCDM problem were evaluated. In addition, the best alternative to ensure simultaneous minimum RS and maximum MRS was proposed