The larger the cracks in the material, then the lower the pressure needed to penetrate into the crack, and to then cause it to grow. Large grained, weakly bonded material, such as for example soil, can, as a result be washed apart by pressures as low as those caused by a heavy rain. As the material becomes more cohesive (think initially of a heavy clay) then the amount of force required to grow the fissures is greater, while the crack lengths are usually smaller. This means that the jet pressure will have to be higher for the same volume of material to be removed.
As one moves from soils to rocks and other materials will increasingly smaller grain size, so the pressure required to cut into the material must be increased. Initially we call the pressure at which the jet starts to dig a hole the initial pressure or threshold pressure of the material.
The way to find out its value is to point the jet at right angles to the jet and begin to raise the jet pressure. When the jet has not enough pressure to penetrate and grow cracks in the target, then it will flow along the surface after impact. However when the jet starts to drill a hole into the target, then the water going into that hole has only one way out – back the way it came, and now the jet comes back along the axis of the jet. (Hitting the operator if the lance is hand-held and this is partly why you need personal protective equipment).
Generally that pressure is not enough to give an economic removal rate and the jet pressure should be raised significantly above the threshold to reach that level. All other things being equal (such as nozzle diameter, standoff distance and traverse speed) then as the jet pressure is raised the depth of the cut will increase in proportion, as will the volume of material removed. This is the case whether the pump providing the water is an intensifier system (usually at higher pressure) or a triplex or similar pump. The main difference in the plot is because of the difference in the diameter of the cutting jets. Berea sandstone is a “standard” rock that has been used in many cutting tests over the decades because of its relatively uniform structure and strength. The uniaxial compressive strength of the sandstone is around 5,000 psi.
Figure 1. The effect of raising jet pressure on the depth of cut achieved in Berea Sandstone with the cuts made at a speed of 12 inches/minute.
This leads into consideration of the second important parameter, that of the flow rate of the jet, which is mainly defined by the diameter of the orifice through which the jet is formed. The flow volume of water is controlled both by the jet pressure (the higher the pressure the faster the water flows out of the nozzle) and by the diameter of the jet. When one is cutting with water alone then it is often better to have higher flow rates at lower pressure rather than the converse. The reason for this is that larger diameter jets hit more flaws on the surface than smaller ones, and the larger the area that is under attack then the greater the likelihood of larger cracks being present and allowing greater volumes of material to be removed. (There are statistical and mathematical justifications for this, but I will forgo going through that math).
When carrying out rough calculations on relative cutting performance over the years we have assumed that the relationship between the depth of cut and the diameter of the orifice is a power relationship with an exponent of 1.5. When comparing the data for Berea sandstone which we obtained as we changed jet diameters we found the following:
Figure 2. The effect of increasing jet diameter on the depth of cut achieved in Berea Sandstone with the cuts made at a speed of 12 inches/minute.
The exponents are not quite at 1.5, but using that value gives a fairly close initial estimate as to the performance that we can achieve.
Part of the problem in seeking a correlation between the jet cutting performance and the nozzle diameter is that the cutting range of the jet changes quite quickly with a change in nozzle diameter. And while we often use a first rough estimate that the jet throw is 125 – 150 diameters in reality the jet performance changes over that range, as the structure of the jet itself changes.
One way of showing this is to show how the cut depth varies when the target surface is at different distances from the nozzle, a value we often call the stand-off distance. In this case the rock is a sandstone, and similar to that used above, but the tests are made with the jet firing at the rock for different lengths of time, rather than traversing over it.
Figure 3. The effect of increasing exposure time and standoff distance on the depth of hole achieved in Sandstone.
Note that there is a relatively rapid drop in cutting performance as the target is moved away from the nozzle, which had a diameter of around 1 mm (0.04 inches). But the plot also shows that the cutting depth drops away very rapidly with time. After half-a-second the jet has cut roughly half an inch deep when the target is half an inch (12.5 mm) from the nozzle, but after doubling the exposure to a second the jet has only increased the depth of cut to 0.6 inches (15 mm) and with the time of exposure increased to five seconds the depth only increases to around 0.7 inches (17.5 mm).
This will be the topic for the next post, where the effect on the speed of cutting is the subject.
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