An experimental investigation of the kerf realised by AWJ: the influence of the pressure fluctuations

The abrasive water jet (AWJ) gained wide acceptance as a tool for machining a wide range of materials from non metallic to high grade steels. End users and researchers have been conducing continuous efforts to improve and spread the use of waterjet technology. A promising area for this technology is the industrial use of abrasive water jets for milling, turning and surface treatment. In these applications, the jet doesn’t pass all the way through the workpiece but it leaves a blind track. In order to control the jet penetration depth, knowledge about which parameters control the process is important. The processing quality depends on the technological parameters, on their unavoidable variations during the process and on external factors. In a previous work (1) the effects of the pressure fluctuations on the striation formation were investigated. In order to do this, cuts on aluminium were made using two different high pressure generation systems, having different technological characteristics. This work, dealing with the influence of pressure fluctuations on the kerf of incomplete cuts, is a continuation of (1). With this aim, incomplete cuts on aluminium were manufactured using the same high pressure generation systems used previously. The profiles of the trace that the abrasive water jet leaves on the lower part of the sample were viewed through X-ray photographs and successively analysed in order to find a correlation between the kerf and the pressure signal.