Abrasive Water Jet Case Study

ABSTRACT:
Cutting and trimming of CFRP laminates with high dimensional accuracy is highly essential for applications like aerospace industry. Non-conventional machining techniques provide a good solution for this problem in which automation, precision and dimensional accuracy can be easily achieved. Among them, Abrasive Water Jet cutting proves to be a promising area since there is no possibility of thermal damage to the material. AWJ cutting belongs to the mechanical group of non-conventional techniques which uses the mechanical energy of water and abrasives to perform the material removal process. Water is pumped at a high pressure and abrasive is added to the stream in such a way that the momentum of water stream is transferred to the abrasives. Hence, the abrasive gets accelerated to a speed high enough to cut very hard materials. In the present work, an attempt has been made to
Alberdi studied a machinability model in composite materials. The machinability index for various composite materials with different thicknesses was found experimentally, which showed very different results for different materials. A study of the effect of the abrasive water jet process parameters on the quality of cut (taper and surface roughness) was carried out. The results showed that composite materials have a significantly higher machinability index than metals (e.g., Aluminium 2024 has a machinability index of 215.3, and stainless steel 316 82.5), which means that composite materials can be cut significantly faster than metals. M.A. Azmir et al carried out a study on the effect of abrasive water jet machining (AWJM) process parameters on surface roughness (Ra) and kerf taper ratio (TR) of aramid fibre reinforced plastics (AFRP) composite. Taguchi’s design of experiment was used as the experimental approach. Through analysis of variance (ANOVA), it was found that the traverse rate was considered to be the most significant factor in both Ra and TR quality