Waterjetting 11c - Mixing abrasive with a water jet

Sometimes I would get the feeling (particularly when talking to some of my students) that the mixing chamber of an abrasive waterjet (AWJ) cutting system, together with the feeds in and the focusing nozzle outlet, were considered to be some magical black box out of which a perfect cutting stream issues to cut the desired material.

There are, in fact a variety of different chamber designs that can be purchased from different manufacturers. Some will tell you that all designs cut roughly the same, and that there is little difference between them. As I commented in one of the earliest posts in this series this is not true. Over the years we have run numerous comparative tests on different designs, using different abrasives, abrasive feed rates and target materials, and have found a broad range of results. For example, in cutting steel at a fixed traverse speed and other conditions, we found an average comparative performance as follows:

Figure 1. Comparative performance between 12 nominally similar abrasive waterjet cutting nozzles in cutting through steel at a standard speed, pump pressure, and abrasive concentration.

I described the actual test in another post, and it is clear from these averaged results that there is a wide difference in performance between the nominally similar tools.

While I don’t think there is a lot of interest in going through the details of different designs it might be helpful to explain some of the factors that play a part in producing jets of greater or lesser performance.

To return, first, to the basic construction of the mixing chamber and focusing tube assembly (AWJ nozzle), one starts by recognizing that the major cutting performance will be achieved by the particles which remove material when they hit the target. The energy that they have, however, comes from the water that is fed into the AWJ nozzle through a small jeweled orifice, or waterjet nozzle, at the top of the mixing chamber.

Figure 2. Basic nozzle design

That waterjet stream is small and initially highly focused and fast moving. As it moves through the mixing chamber, as I have described in other posts, the outer edges of the jet slow down, and gradually the jet fans out and breaks up into fragments.

There is no benefit in trying to inject the abrasive into the jet at the beginning of this passage, since, at that point, the outer layers of the jet have enough energy to knock away the particles before they can enter the fastest moving segment in the core. Rather it is better to inject the abrasive further down the chamber, so that the jet will have begun to break down into slugs, and the abrasive can be positioned so that it is impacted by a sequence of the individual slugs and accelerated to the desired velocity.

There is an additional benefit to moving the abrasive feed line a little further down the chamber. When the jet stream is rapidly switched on and off, when for example, piercing a series of small holes in a part, then the driving pressure pushing water out of the waterjet orifice switches off and on. When it switches off there is a short period where the differential pressure will draw fluid from the chamber back through the waterjet nozzle. If there are small particles of abrasive in the vicinity (and with some designs there are) then these can be drawn back through the upper orifice, and then pushed back down by the succeeding water flow in the next pulse. This can rapidly erode softer jeweled orifices, so that they round or chip, not always evenly, and degrade the resulting waterjet as it flows into the chamber. This disruption can move the jet from being in the center of the chamber, and cause poor abrasive pick-up or accelerate wear of the chamber walls, and in the focusing tube. All of these degrade performance. (The solution, if you can achieve it, is to use a diamond upper orifice, since this is largely non-responsive to the passage of the abrasive back and forth, and retains its shape and the jet performance it was designed to produce much longer – providing a cost benefit to the change).

Fig 3. Wear on a ruby waterjet orifice inserted at the top of a mixing chamber after 15 minutes of use. (The dark particles are small particles of garnet)

Figure 4. Chipping on the edges of sapphire and ruby orifices (after Powell 2007 WJTA Conference)

Fig 5. Lack of wear on a diamond insert nozzle after being in use for several hundred hours.

With the abrasive inlet channel and jet passage designed to get the abrasive into the jet where the water jet is broken up, yet still moving at high speed, there needs to be a sufficient distance for an optimal energy transfer to occur. Beyond that point, with the particle and the abrasive (which will have partially been broken in the contact between the jet and the particle, between particles striking one another, and between contact between the particle and the walls of the AWJ nozzle) the cutting jet has to be refocused into the narrow cutting stream that is required to give the finished cut surface desired.

The refocusing of the mixed jet (air, water and abrasive) is achieved with a focusing tube, which is made up of a conic section which brings the jet back together, and then a straight section which allows further energy transfer between the three component parts of the jet, before the jet issues from the orifice aimed at the target.

The passage of the particle down this tube is not always straight. Wear typically begins at the tip of the conic section as it feeds into the tube. The wear within the tube will often take up a pattern, as any irregularity in the flow causes it to bounce from one wall of the tube to the other creating a wear pattern along the walls that has a wave-like structure.

Figure 6. Wear at different points along the focusing tube

When this wear reaches the mouth of the focusing tube, then the downstream orifice is eroded out of a circular shape, and the jet that comes out no longer will cut cleanly, or to as great a depth. At that point the nozzle is worn out and should be replaced. The point at which that replacement occurs varies depending on the quality of the cut that is required. Obviously when the cut being made is at a precision of a thousandth of an inch over a cut depth of half-an-inch (as with some aircraft parts) the replacement point is reached a little earlier than if the cuts being made are a rough cut merely, for example, to separate two parts one from another, and provide a rough shape to the piece.

I’ll continue this topic in the next segment of this section.

Waterjetting 10d - Abrasive sizing

Over the past 30 years abrasive waterjet cutting has become an increasingly useful tool for cutting a wide range of materials, of varying thickness and strength. However, as the range of applications for the tool has grown, so the requirements for improved performance have also risen. Before being able to make a better quality cut there had to be a better understanding of how abrasive waterjet cutting works, so that the improvements could be made.

Figure 1. Some factors that affect the cutting performance of an abrasive waterjet (After Mazurkiewicz)

This understanding has not been easy to develop, since there are many different factors that all affect how well the cutting process takes place. Consider, first of all, the process of getting the abrasive up to the fastest speed possible. And for the purpose of discussion I am going to use a “generic” mixing chamber and focusing tube nozzle for the following discussion.

Figure 2. Simplified sketch of a mixing chamber and focusing tube nozzle used in adding abrasive to a high pressure waterjet.

As high-pressure water flows through the small orifice (which in the sketch was historically made of sapphire) it enters a larger mixing chamber and creates a suction that will pull abrasive into the mixing chamber through the side passage. That side passage is connected, through a tube, to a form of abrasive feed mechanism, that I will not discuss in detail today.

However the abrasive does not flow into the mixing chamber by itself. Rather it is transported into the mixing chamber using a fluid carrier. In the some of the earliest models of abrasive waterjet systems water was used as the carrier fluid to bring the abrasive into the mixing chamber. This, as a general rule, turned out to be a mistake.

The problem is that, within the mixing chamber, the energy that comes into the chamber with the high-pressure water has to mix, not only with the abrasive, but also with the fluid that carried the abrasive into the chamber. Water is heavier than air, and so if water is the carrier fluid, then it will absorb more of the energy that is available, with the result that there is less for the abrasive, which – as a result – does not move as quickly and therefore does not cut as well. The principle was first discussed by John Griffiths at the 2nd U.S. Waterjet Conference, although he was discussing abrasive use in cleaning at the time.

Figure 3 Difference in performance of water acting to carry the abrasive to the mixing chamber (wet feed) in contrast with the use of air as the carrier fluid. (Griffiths, J.J., "Abrasive Injection Usage in the United Kingdom," 2nd U.S. Waterjet Conference, May, 1983, Rolla, MO, pp. 423 - 432.)

Note that this is not the same as directly mixing the abrasive into the waterjet stream under pressure – abrasive slurry jetting – which I will discuss in later posts.

The difference between the two ways of bringing the abrasive to the mixing chamber is clear enough that almost from the beginning only air has been considered as the carrier to bring the abrasive into the mixing chamber. However there is the question as to how much air is enough, how much abrasive should be added, and how effectively the mixing process takes place.

In the earlier developments the equipment available restricted the range of pressures and flow rates at which the high pressure water could be supplied, and these limits bounded early work on the subject.

One early observation, however, was that the size of the abrasive that was being fed into the mixing chamber was not the average size of the abrasive after cutting was over. (At that time steel was not normally used as a cutting abrasive). Because the fracture of the abrasive into smaller pieces might mean that the cutting process became less effective, Greg Galecki and Marian Mazurkiewicz began to measure particle sizes, at different points in the process. (Galecki, G., Mazurkiewicz, M., Jordan, R., "Abrasive Grain Disintegration Effect During Jet Injection," International Water Jet Symposium,Beijing, China, September, 1987, pp. 4-71 - 4-77.)

For example, by firing the abrasive-laden jet along the axis of a larger plastic tube (here opened to show the construction) the abrasive would, after leaving the nozzle, decelerate and settle into the bottom of the tube, without further break-up, and without damage to the tube. Among other results this allowed a measure of how fast the particles leave the nozzle, since the faster they were moving, then the further they would carry down the pipe.

Figure 4. Test to examine particle size and travel distance, after leaving the AWJ nozzle at the left of the picture. The containing tube has divisions every foot, and small holes over blue containers, so that the amount caught in every foot could be collected and measured.

For one particular test the abrasive going into the system was carefully screened to be lie in the size range between 170 and 210 microns. It was then fed into a 30,000 psi waterjet at a feed rate of 0.6 lb/minute. The particles were captured, after passing through the mixing chamber, but before they could cut anything, by using the tube shown in Figure 4. The size of the particles was then measured, and plotted as a cumulative percentage adding the percentages found at each sieve size over the range to the 210 micron size of the starting particles.

Figure 5. Average size of particles after passing through a mixing chamber and exiting into a capture tube, without further damaging impact.

The horizontal line shows the point where 50% of the abrasive (by weight) had accumulated, and the vertical line shows that this is at a particle size of 140 microns. Thus, just in the mixing process alone energy is lost in mixing the very fast moving water, with the initially much slower moving abrasive.

And, as an aside, this is where the proper choice of abrasive becomes an important part of an effective cutting operation. Because the distribution of the curve shown in figure 5 will change, with abrasive type, size, concentration added, as well as the pressure and flow rate of the nozzle through which the water enters the mixing chamber.

I will have more to discuss on this in the next post, but will leave you with the following result. After we had run the tests which I just mentioned, we collected the abrasive in the different size ranges. Then we used those different size ranges to see how well the abrasive cut. This was one of the results that we found.

Figure 6. The effect of the size of the feed particles into the abrasive cutting system on the depth of cut which the AWJ achieved.

You will note that down to a size of around 100 microns the particle size did not make any significant difference, but that once the particle size falls below that range, then the cutting performance degrades considerably. (And if you go back to figure 5, you will note that about 30% of the abrasive fell into that size range, after the jet had left the mixing chamber).