Effect of impact angle and velocity in crater circularity in abrasive water jet machining by means of multi-particle impact simulation

Traditional machining of carbon epoxy composite material is difficult due to excessive tool wear, excessive stresses and heat generation, delamination, high surface waviness, etc. In the present paper, research work involved in the experimental study of abrasive water jet machining of carbon epoxy composite material is described. The aim of present work is to improve surface finish and studying defects in machined samples. Taguchi's orthogonal array approach is used to design experiments. Process parameters namely hydraulic pressure, traverse rate, stand-off distance and abrasive mass flow rate are considered for this study. Analysis of machined surfaces and kerf quality is carried out using scanning electron microscope to evaluate microscopic features. Further, the effect of machining parameters on surface roughness is investigated using analysis of variance approach. It is found that traverse rate and pressure are most significant parameters to control surface roughness. Optimization of process parameters is performed using grey relational analysis. Thereafter, confirmation tests are carried out to verify the improvement in the surface quality with optimum set of process parameters. It is found that surface finish of machined samples is improved by 10.75% with optimum levels of process parameters. Defects like delamination, fiber pull-out and abrasive embedment are also studied using SEM. It is observed that delamination and fiber pull-out are prominent in samples machined at low pressure and high traverse rate.

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Process Parameter Optimization for Abrasive Water Jet Machining of Titanium Alloy Using Meta-Heuristic Algorithms

MATEC Web of Conferences ◽

10.1051/matecconf/201822101004 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 221 ◽

pp. 01004

Author(s):

Vishal S Sharma ◽

Amit Kumar ◽

Munish Kumar Gupta ◽

Neeraj Bhanot

Keyword(s):

Titanium Alloy ◽

Process Parameters ◽

Heuristic Algorithms ◽

Removal Rate ◽

Short Interval ◽

Water Jet ◽

Abrasive Water Jet ◽

Influence Of Process Parameters ◽

Abrasive Water Jet Machining ◽

Industrial Sectors

Recently, the trend of optimization algorithms for improvements of surface quality and productivity characteristics in abrasive water jet machining of titanium alloy (Ti-6Al-4V alloy) has become increasingly more widespread in various industrial sectors i.e., aircraft and automobile Industries. Here, the present research attempts to select the ideal or best AWJM process parameters by implementing the well known meta-heuristic algorithm i.e., Teacher learning based optimization method (TLBO). The AWJM experiments as per the Taguchi L9 orthogonal array were performed on Ti 6Al-4V titanium alloy by considering jet transverse speed, stand-off distance and abrasive flow as the input parameters. Then, the influence of process parameters on surface roughness and material removal rate has been performed by means plot and ANOVA analysis. After that, the results are optimized with the TLBO method. The overall results indicate that the TLBO method is an efficient method used to find the optimal results with very short interval of time i.e., within 3 sec.

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