Influence of process parameters on delamination of GFRP with abrasive water jet machining

Abstract

Abrasive water jet machining (AWJM) is extensively employed for machining composites such as glass fibre-reinforced polymers (GFRP). AWJM has been demonstrated to be a cost-effective and practical material removal technique for composites, in which a high-speed jet of abrasive and water erodes the material on the workpiece surface. In this paper, an experimental investigation is explained which is focused on investigating the impact of process parameters on the delamination of machined samples during AWJM of GFRP composites. Four main process parameters namely water pressure (WP), traverse rate (TR), standoff distance (SOD), and abrasive mass flow rate (AMFR) are considered to study their influence on delamination. For design of experiments Minitab 18′s Taguchi L16 orthogonal array is used, and ANOVA is applied to find out the significance and effect of process parameters on delamination. It is revealed that delamination increases with an increase in traverse rate and water pressure and is prominent at the bottom portion of machined samples. The delamination is measured using a scanning electron microscope (SEM).