An exploration of an abrasive water jet cutting front profile

Abrasive water jet (AWJ) now is used as a precision cutting tool. With this tool, dimension tolerance less than 0.1 mm is expected in the cutting process. This dimension tolerance is enough for some applications. However, higher precision is necessary in order to use AWJ in some other applications. To get higher precision in an AWJ cutting process, controlling AWJ beam more accurately is needed, and this further leads to understanding AWJ cutting front more accurately. This paper compared the current cutting front profile exploration methods and then provided a new method to collect AWJ cutting front information accurately. With this new method, a better understanding of the cutting front profile is possible, which further leads to higher precision cutting of AWJ. This paper also demonstrated that the AWJ cutting front profile could be fitted by parabolic curves accurately.