Study on traverse speed in cutting plastic and brittle materials with ASJ

The contradiction between cutting quality and efficiency limits the potential applications of abrasive suspension jet (ASJ). Obviously, both of the kerf taper and surface roughness are key points to the cutting quality in industrial application, as well as the traverse speed to the cutting efficiency. In the paper, full factorial design of experiments was carried out for finding different effects of traverse speed upon three response variables—precision, kerf taper, and surface roughness—in cutting plastic and brittle materials with ASJ. With a stereoscopic microscope used to film and measure the kerf of plastic and brittle materials cut by ASJ under different traverse speeds, the relationship between kerf width and traverse speed was obtained. And the paper presented the detailed theoretical explanation about the above relationship from the view of energy. Finally, based on the ANFIS, a fuzzy model for predicting traverse speed was set up with four inputs (material, precision, kerf taper, and lower surface roughness) and one output (traverse speed) included, which can be guidance for choosing the optimal traverse speed in ASJ cutting.