Design analysis of high-pressure pure water jet nozzle for cutting industry

The increasing demand for cut quality has led to the emergence of new processing technologies, especially when many alloys are considered quite difficult to be cut. One of the most advanced technology is water jet cutting. The problem was the low efficiency in the cutting process using a water jet that not only can cut metals but also food products without contaminating them. The objective of this study is to optimize the cutting process in relation to the nozzle diameter as the observed parameter. The pure water jet was chosen instead of an abrasive water jet to avoid contamination of food products. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) were used as the solver to visualize how the liquid flows. Some parameters were taken from the previous study as references and were optimized for observation. The pressure and nozzle diameter used are 200, 400 and 600 MPa and 0.15, 0.2 and 0.3 mm respectively. After the analysis, it is found that as the pressure of the water jet increase, the water velocity is increasing. Moreover, as the diameter of the nozzle hole increase, the spray of water become wider. The most suitable parameters were found to be 200 MPa and 0.15 mm of pressure and nozzle diameter respectively. This will allow for the intended food cutting process with a stand-off distance around 8 mm.