| Abstract [eng] |
Today, there are advanced modern cutting methods available on the market for a wide range of materials, which help industrial companies to solve many material processing problems, such as very high cutting precision, designing more complex profiles, significantly reducing production time, and minimizing the amount of waste generated during production. Various composite materials are also now widely used due to the excellent properties of composite materials, such as flexibility in design, low density, high strength, and long-term durability. There is also a wide range of processing techniques for composite materials. Of these methods, abrasive water jet machining is one of the most popular and best methods offered by researchers due to the quality of the output it provides. This project presents a study of abrasive water jet machining (AWJM) of four types of fibre reinforced polymer composites, such as basalt, glass, carbon, and aramid. The abrasive water jet cut and texture quality of these fibre-reinforced composite laminates have been investigated by analysing various parameters such as surface roughness values, kerf width, and angle. The results of the experiment confirm that cutting composite materials using AWJM ensures high quality and precision. The influence of two different feed speeds (fine 50 mm/s and coarse 70 mm/s) on cutting quality was investigated and showed good machining results for all composite materials. With the exception of the carbon fibre reinforced epoxy composite, delamination was observed in all other fibre reinforced epoxy composites, which is very common in machining composites. From the cutting angles and surface roughness values, it was found that fine cutting provides better quality than coarse cutting. The analysis of the texturing results showed that only carbon and aramid fibre reinforced epoxy resin composites could be textured using predefined machining parameters. The cutting cost calculations show that coarse cutting is much more economical than fine cutting. This can reduce the environmental impact by reducing operating costs and waste after the machining process. |
