Experimental Study on Surface Roughness in Abrasive Water Jet Cutting

In the present paper, the effects of material thickness, traverse speed and abrasive mass flow rate during abrasive water jet cutting of aluminum on surface roughness were investigated. GMT garnet was used as abrasive material with 80 mesh. Surface roughness was measured across of depth of cut. The experimental results show that traverse speed has great effect on the surface roughness at the bottom of the cut. It was also discussed the correlation between the surface roughness and other abrasive water jet cutting variables. Based on the experiments, the optimal process parameters for each material thickness were defined.