A Strategy for Generating Contoured Surface With Abrasive Waterjet Milling on Ductile Materials

Surface generation by abrasive waterjet milling is one of the emerging applications of waterjet machining for processing of difficult to cut materials like super alloys, titanium alloys and hardened tool steels. The key aspect lies in the identification of certain important parameters that influence the kerf geometry and develop control strategies to produce easily reproducible kerfs and combine them together to produce a contoured surface. In this work, an attempt is made to devise control strategies, based on certain kinematic operating parameters like traverse rate, stand-off distance and impact angle of jet on the material, to generate a series of reproducible kerfs and to merge them together to produce a contoured surface. This is achieved by first discretely milling the surface into a series of kerfs separated by thin unmachined region and then gradually increasing the depth of these kerfs to match the requirements of the contoured surface with multiple traversal of jet. Subsequently these kerfs are merged by removing the regions separating them. The proposed control strategy is demonstrated by milling contoured surface on stainless steel 304 alloy. Finally, the efficiency of the proposed control strategy for producing contoured surface is assessed in terms of dimensional accuracy achieved on the milled surface.Copyright © 2012 by ASME