In the present study, CFRP/Ti6Al4V stacks were machined with abrasive water jet using different process parameters in order evaluate the viability of AWJ industrial application as a substitute of conventional drilling. The effect of the stack configuration, the traverse feed rate, the cutting tool (combination of orifice and focusing tube diameter and abrasive mass flow rate), and the pressure over the kerf profile, taper angle, and surface roughness has been analyzed through an ANOVA analysis and related to the physical parameters of the AWJ process. As a result, a positive taper angle is observed in Ti6Al4V while a negative is observed in CFRP in almost all cutting conditions. This leads to obtain an X-type or barrel-type kerf profile depending on the stack configuration. In addition, the surface roughness can be as low as 6.5 μm in both CFRP and Ti6Al4V materials at 95 mm/min when CFRP/Ti6Al4V configuration is used.

Abrasive Water Jet (AWJ) technology has demonstrated to be an interesting manufacturing process for space, aircraft, boat and automotive sectors due to its specific advantages when machining composite materials. However, AWJ cutting of composite laminates possesses several challenges. It is necessary to develop a methodology to adapt the process parameters for each type of FRP & CFRP material which will allow AWJ trimming operations to be easily carried out on composite materials, since machine manufacturers still do not provide good databases for composite cutting. The presented work aims at studying the behaviour of a machinability model in composite materials. The machinability index for various composite materials with different thicknesses was found experimentally, which showed very different results for different materials. A study of the effect of the abrasive waterjet process parameters on the quality of cut (taper and surface roughness) was carried out