Enhancing the capability and performance of abrasive waterjet cutting technology by multipass operations

The technique of multipass operations is introduced to abrasive waterjet (AWJ) machining of engineering materials. It shows that multipass AWJ cutting operations can greatly increase the capability and cutting performance (such as the smooth depth of cut and surface finish) of this technology, and hence increase its application domain to relatively thick materials and where the quality requirements are high. It is also found that multipass operation is superior to single pass cutting and requires less total cutting time than a single pass cutting in producing the same cutting performance. The study on combining the multipass cutting mode and angling the jet forward in the cutting plane has shown to be able to further enhance the capability of AWJ cutting and its application domain without any additional costs to the process.