In the field of EDM and, specially in microEDM, there are many fields of research which will be important in the future.

Although it can sound strange, the first research field is to know what really happens in the EDM process. Just as Prof. Schumacher presented in ISEM XV [20], despite being a industrially well established process and its broad application by many sectors, there are many theories about what happens during the discharge but none of them can explain completely the process.

The process conditions: machining inside a dielectric fluid with a gap of just a few microns, gas generation with material particles projected at high speed and high temperature at a repetition rate circa 1 MHz. All these aspects make the process hard to model and difficult to characterise.

Measurements using high speed cameras, sensors with high frequency range, etc. have made possible to understand the process better. Nevertheless, there are some discrepancies and the real knowledge about the process is limited.

For micro EDM, the process lacks reliability. The applied wires and electrodes are far from their yield strength to avoid ruptures, this reduces the process productivity and the maximum reachable accuracy. For micro EDM, most of the machines are still limited in terms of interpolation, etc.

Specially for micro EDM milling, the electrode wear is a field of research, together with CAM generation to consider the electrode wear compensation within the electrode trajectory.

The high costs of machinery, components, electrodes, machine tuning, technical assistance (usually provided from the machine production origin country because, even for machines developed by companies like Agie, Charmilles or Sodick with an International commercial net, the models are so specific that technical assistance must be done by experts from the main headquarters in Europe or in the country of origin). At present, all these difficulties and the high skills demanded from the operators make also difficult the industrial implementation.

At present, there is a lot of job to do until obtaining technology tables for both microEDM and thin WEDM to make introduce these machines as production systems in industrial companies.

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