Study on Effect of Abrasive Water Jet Machining Process Parameter on Taper Angle during Machining of Epoxy Resin Glass Fibre

Abstract

Abrasive Water Jet Machining (AWJM) is one of the most advanced machining processes, which has the ability to machine various materials. In this paper, experiment was performed on cutting of epoxy fibre glass by AWJM. Epoxy fibre glass is a composite which consists of fibre glass cloth and epoxy resin as binder, achieved under specific heat and pressure. There are various process parameters such as water pressure, standoff distance, abrasive flow rate, traverse rate, abrasive etc. The water pressure and standoff distance was varied while performing the experiment and rest all parameters were kept constant. From this experiment taper angle was measured and it was observed that taper angle increases as the standoff distance increases, this is because the shape of the jet diverges with larger standoff distance. Minimum taper angle was observed as 0.34° at 32 ksi pressure, having 2 mm standoff distance. It was also observed that width of cut has significant effect on taper angle. From further calculations, the deviation of the cut slot for top width was observed as +1% to 5% and for bottom width it was -1% to 2%.