Abrasive Waterjet Micro Machining of Non-Conventional Materials for Industrial Applications

The waterjet technology is enjoying considerable success in industrial processing applications. This is due to its extreme flexibility in machining various materials and geometries and to the limited thermal or mechanical side effects produced on the final part. These distinctive features are kept even reducing the diameter of the jet to the typical dimensions that are suitable for micromachining, thus stimulating research and industry to create a micro abrasive water jet (microAWJ) system. This paper illustrates the results achieved by the WJ_Lab - Politecnico di Milano after solving the issues arisen during the development of the Micro Abrasive Water Jet System. The entire system has been tested by means of specific tasks in order to prove its suitability for actual industrial applications. Attention has been focused on processing non-conventional materials, such as special alloys, non-metallic composites and fibrous matrix sandwiches. On these workpieces, various features have been machined, in order to find out the specific process parameters for each one and to evaluate the cutting quality in terms of kerf width and surface quality.