Preliminary Study of Mass Material Removal for Aluminum Alloy by Low Pressure Abrasive Water Jet

Abstract

Nowadays, great demands are placed on the improvement of technological processes from the perspective of quality and also from the environmental point of view. Most of the recent studies of control depth machining are realized with pressures above 100 MPa. The presented article focuses on preliminary testing of control depth cut machining by abrasive water jet technology with low pressure 50 MPa and low abrasive mass flow. The study shows promising results for the high-strength aluminum alloy AW7075. Experiments were realized using 5 levels of traverse speed (from 100–500 mm.min−1) and 4 levels of abrasives mass flow (20–50 g.min−1). The maximal mass material removal observed was 0,12 g pre one pass, and the maximal depth observed was 843 µm, both with traverse speed 100 mm.min−1 but with different abrasive mass flow. According to the obtained results can be designed more complex experiments to determine possibilities of control depth machining using an abrasive water jet with 50 MPa pressure.