Cut quality characteristics of Al 6061-T6 composites using abrasive water jet machining

Abstract

This work investigates the cut quality characteristics of composite consisting of Al6061-T6 with magnesium AZ 31 and rock dust as reinforcement material using abrasive water jet machining. To analyse the characteristics of this new composite three different compositions are taken with different proportions of magnesium and rock dust. The composites are produced in the stir casting process, in which aluminium and magnesium are taken as solid metal and rock dust as taken as fine (30 μm) powdered form. The molten metal is converted into a solid workpiece of 100 × 100 × 10 mm. Among various non-traditional machining abrasive water jet machine has minimum thermal deformation. Hence, in this abrasive water jet machine is used to find the cut quality of the new composites. The machining is carried out on Water Jet Germany S 3015 abrasive water jet machine. The experiments for each sample are performed based on Taguchi's L9 orthogonal array. The input parameters are abrasive flow rate, feed rate and standoff distance and output response are material removal rate, surface roughness and kerf deviation. The models developed from ANOVA are significant for the entire three test specimen.