Simulation analysis of damage and energy consumption of rocks during abrasive water jet impacts based on SPH-FDEM method

This study established a simulation model for abrasive water jet rock breaking based on the SPH-FDEM method. The effects of abrasive concentration and jet velocity on crack and energy consumption were investigated based on the model. The effect of finite and infinite element boundaries on simulation results was compared, and it was found that the infinite element boundary can mitigate the damage caused by stress wave reflection on rocks. During water jet rock breaking, the crack mode inside the rock was dominated by Mode-I crack (opening-mode crack) due to the water wedge effect, and the number of cracks and the broken volume increased with increasing velocity and abrasive concentration. In this study, the specific energy consumption (SEC) was used to evaluated the rock-breaking capacity. Under pure water jetting, the SEC decreased with increasing velocity, while with the addition of abrasive, the SEC increased with increasing velocity and abrasive concentration. These findings provided a basis for optimization of water jet machining parameters in engineering applications.