Contour cutting of pre-formed parts with abrasive waterjet using 3-axis nozzle control

Abrasive waterjet cutting is a manufacturing process that allows cutting a wide range of materials which are often difficult to process by means of conventional cutting methods. Similar to other beam type cutting processes, the waterjet is traditionally applied in a direction perpendicular to the surface to be cut. For cutting contours in pre-formed parts, 5- or 6-axis control is required to orient the waterjet beam perpendicular to the part surface along the cutting profile. In this paper, the results of experiments, performed to test the applicability of 3-axis nozzle control for cutting 3D profile parts, are presented. In these experiments, water pressure, feed rate, stand-off distance and inclination angle were varied as the most crucial process parameters. A case study of 3D cutting demonstrates that, with 3-axis control, tolerances of the order of magnitude of the positioning accuracy of the test set-up can be obtained.