Multiphase Flow and Wear in the Cutting Head of Ultra-high Pressure Abrasive Water Jet

Abrasive water jet cutting technology is widely applied in the materials processing today and attracts great attention from scholars, but many phenomena concerned are not well understood, especially in the internal jet flow of the cutting head at the condition of ultra-high pressure. The multiphase flow in the cutting head is numerically simulated to study the abrasive motion mechanism and wear inside the cutting head at the pressure beyond 300 MPa. Visible predictions of the particles trajectories and wear rate in the cutting head are presented. The influences of the abrasive physical properties, size of the jewel orifice and the operating pressure on the trajectories are discussed. Based on the simulation, a wear experiment is carried out under the corresponding pressures. The simulation and experimental results show that the flow in the mixing chamber is composed of the jet core zone and the disturbance zone, both affect the particles trajectories. The mixing efficiency drops with the increase of the abrasive granularity. The abrasive density determines the response of particles to the effects of different flow zones, the abrasive with medium density gives the best general performance. Increasing the operating pressure or using the jewel with a smaller orifice improves the coherency of p articles trajectories but increases the wear rate of the jewel holder at the same time. Walls of the jewel holder, the entrance of the mixing chamber and the convergence part of the mixing tube are subject to wear out. The computational and experimental results give a qualitative consistency which proves that this numerical method can provide a reliable and visible cognition of the flow characteristics of ultra-high pressure abrasive water jet. The investigation is benefit for improving the machining properties of water jet cutting systems and the optimization design of the cutting head.

Comminution of Mica by Cavitation Abrasive Water Jet

The comminution of mica with an abrasive water jet is mainly based on three knids of effects, that is, high-speed collision, cavitating effect and shearing effect. Cavitation abrasive water jet was applied for the comminution of mica because cavitation abrasive water jet can make full use of the three effects mentioned above. Besides high speed impacting among particles,cavitation and shearing were also enhanced due to the divergent angle at the outlet of the cavitation nozzle.A JME-200CX transmission electron microscope was used for observing the size distribution of particles.Variance analysis on the experimental results indicates that the effect of cavitation is much more significant than that of collision.The effect of pressure on comminution results becomes less with the decrease of the particle size.

Orthogonal design of experiment and analysis of abrasive water jet cutting on carbon fiber reinforced composites

The carbon fiber reinforced composite is a new type of composite material with an excellent property in strength and elastic modulus,and has found extensive applications in aerospace,energy,automotive industry and so on.However,this composite has a strict requirement on processing techniques,for example,brittle damage or delamination often exists in conventional processing techniques.Abrasive water jet machining technology is a new type of green machining technique with distinct advantages such as high-energy and thermal distortion free.The use of abrasive water jet technique to process carbon fiber composite materials has become a popular trend since it can significantly improve the processing accuracy and surface quality of carbon fiber composite materials.However,there are too many parameters that affect the quality of an abrasive water jet machining.At present,few studies are carried out on the parameter optimization of such a machining process,which leads to the unstable quality of surface processing.In this paper,orthogonal design of experiment and regression analysis were employed to establish the empirical model between cutting surface roughness and machining process parameters.Then a verified model was used to optimize the machining process parameters for abrasive water jet cutting carbon fiber reinforced composites.

Study on the influence of standoff distance on substrate damage under an abrasive water jet process by molecular dynamics simulation

The process of a cluster-containing water jet impinging on a monocrystalline silicon substrate was studied by molecular dynamics simulation. The results show that as the standoff distance increases, the jet will gradually diverge. As a result, the solidified water film between the cluster and the substrate becomes "thicker" and "looser". The "thicker" and "looser" water film will then consume more input energy to achieve complete solidification, resulting in the stress region and the high-pressure region of the silicon substrate under small standoff distances to be significantly larger than those under large standoff distances. Therefore, the degree of damage sustained by the substrate will first experience a small change and then decrease quickly as the standoff distance increases. In summary, the occurrence and maintenance of complete solidification of the confined water film between the cluster and the substrate plays a decisive role in the level of damage formation on the silicon substrate. These findings are helpful for exploring the mechanism of an abrasive water jet.

Air flow exploration of abrasive feed tube

An abrasive water-jet cutting process is one in which water pressure is raised to a very high pressure and forced through a very small orifice to form a very thin high speed jet beam. This thin jet beam is then directed through a chamber and then fed into a secondary nozzle, or mixing tube. During this process, a vacuum is generated in the cham- ber, and garnet abrasives and air are pulled into the chamber, through an abrasive feed tube, and mixes with this high speed stream of water. Because of the restrictions introduced by the abrasive feed tube geometry, a vacuum gradient is generated along the tube. Although this phenomenon has been recog- nized and utilized as a way to monitor nozzle condition and abrasive flowing conditions, yet, until now, conditions inside the abrasive feed line have not been completely understood. A possible reason is that conditions inside the abrasive feed line are complicated. Not only compressible flow but also multi- phase, multi-component flow has been involved in inside of abrasive feed tube. This paper explored various aspects of the vacuum creation process in both the mixing chamber and the abrasive feed tube. Based on an experimental exploration, an analytical framework is presented to allow theoretical calculations of vacuum conditions in the abrasive feed tube.

Effect of cavitation on comminution of mica powder

The cavitation abrasive water jet was used in the comminution ofmica. By applying a cavitation nozzle in the abrasive water jetsystem to enhance the effect of cavitation and friction, bettercomminution results were obtained. The JME-200CX transmission elec-tron microscope was used for observing the size distribution ofparticles. As using cavitation abrasive water jet, the relativecomminution effect is raised by more than 25/100 compared with usingabrasive water jet only. It can be concluded that the effect ofcavitation is much more significant than that of impacting in thecomminution of mica.