EFFECTS OF MIXING CHAMBER SHAPE ON CUTTING PERFORMANCE IN ABRASIVE WATER JET

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 Graduate student, Intelligent Control and Automation Division, Dept. Mechanical Eng., Pusan National University, Busan, South Korea.

2 Graduate student, Dept. of Mechanical and Intelligence System Engineering, Pusan National University, Busan, South Korea.

3 Associate professor, Research Institute of Mechanical Technology, Pusan National University, Busan, South Korea.

4 Professor, Dept. Mechanical Engineering, Pusan National University and ERC/NSDM, Busan, South Korea.

Abstract

ABSTRACT
It is well known that abrasive water jet (AWJ) was developed as a kind of highdensity
energy processing technologies. AWJ is used to obtain cutting quality of
various materials such as metal, ceramics, glass and composite materials within a
short manufacturing time because of the characteristics of heatless and noncontact
processing. However, surface roughness and dimension error like round, burr, taper
depend on the cutting conditions such as pump pressure, cutting speed, orifice
diameter, standoff distance, abrasive flow rate and work piece.
In this paper, the effect of the shape of mixing chamber on surface quality is studied.
Parabolic mixing chamber is proposed and performance is compared to that of
cylindrical mixing chamber by experiment. The surface roughness was improving
0.15 to 2.29 and the taper angle was improving 0.0716° to 0.143° by parabolic
mixing chamber.

Keywords