doi: 10.3850/978-981-11-0749-8_693
Efficiency and Quality of Cutting Polymer Materials with Cooled Water Jet
Marko Jerman, Andrej Lebar, Pavel Drešar, Izidor Sabotin and Joško Valentinčič
Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, University of Ljubljana, Aškerčeva 6, Ljubljana
Abstract
Cutting with high speed water jet is believed to be a cold technology in the domain of contour cutting. Water jet technology is efficient and flexible, thus it lately became widespread in the fields of applications in which temperature of the water jet and the absence of embedded grains when using abrasive is of primary importance. Because a part of the kinetic energy of water jet is transformed into heat during the cutting process, it turns out that some materials with rather low melting point exhibit partial melting in the cutting zone. The quality of cutting is therefore poor, since the melted material is hardened at the bottom of the cut and forms large burr. It is expected, that by cooling the high pressure waterjet this issues can be overcome.
In this work the influence of the water temperature, pressure and the cutting speed on the quality of cut of three different polymer materials is investigated. Polymer materials were chosen since they exhibit different low melting temperature. A comprehensive plan of experiments and measurements of the efficiency and quality of cut with respect to burr was implemented.
The results confirm the hypothesis concerning the quality of the cut, while the cutting efficiency is slightly lower with the decreasing temperature of the water.
Keywords: Water jet, Ice abrasive water jet, Sub-cooled water, Polymer materials, Burr detection, Cutting efficiency
