A review on continuous and pulsed water jet machining

Abstract

Development of materials such as hard to cut metals, composites, ceramics, rocks are posing challenge to the conventional machining processes. To certain extent water jetting especially continuous water jet (CWJ) and pulsating water jet (PWJ) has shown a ray of alternate to the manufacturing public which take care of climatic change, scarcity of resources, and generation of heat during machining. The literature on CWJ and PWJ as a non-conventional machining process in manufacturing has shown a fast growth. Since the literature is quite disintegrated, we presume that the time is ripe to explore into current knowledge base in the PWJ & CWJ research field on hard to cut metals and rocks, provide the ready database to academia and researches for further work. The research work on PWJ and CWJ is discussed in this review paper. The reduction of energy application in terms of reduced pressure, better erosion performance and strengthening effect of metals due to use of water jet are few advantages of PWJ over CWJ. There are many parameters influencing the performance of PWJ and CWJ mainly affect the quality of cutting are pressure, frequency, standoff distance, traverse velocity, nozzle diameter. Surface roughness Ra andRz, volume of material removal (V), width of cut (b) and depth of cut (h) are important quality parameters.