A study on recycling of abrasives in abrasive water jet machining

This paper reports the effect of recycling of local garnet abrasives (origin: southern India) while cutting aluminium using abrasive water jet machining. The influence of pressure, traverse rate, and abrasive flow rate on American Foundrymen's Society grain fineness number, average particle size, depth of cut, top kerf width, bottom kerf width, kerf taper, and surface finish obtained using a specially formulated optimised abrasive test sample have been studied. The performance of the test sample has been compared with that of commercial grade abrasive of mesh size 80. Recycling studies, undertaken with used abrasives after screening out particles less than 90 mum size and also with all particles without screening are reported. It is found that the test sample performed better than mesh size 80 abrasives, in terms of achievable depth of cut and surface finish. Recycled abrasives reduces kerf taper, improving the parallelism of cut surface. These results indicate that the proper selection of abrasive particle size distribution is necessary for achieving improved results. The reusability percentage of test sample of the local abrasives that can be recycled is determined as 8 1 %. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.