Impact of preparation of titanium alloys on their abrasive water jet machining

Abstract

Several titanium alloys, i.e., grade 2 Ti, Ti6Al4V and NiTi alloy, prepared by selected deformation procedures were subjected to abrasive water jet (AWJ) cutting and subsequently analysed. The study describes samples' preparations and respective material structures. The impact of deformation processing of the selected alloys on the declination angle during cutting, and the results of measurements of surface wall quality performed for the selected samples at the Department of Physics of Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at VSB-Technical University of Ostrava, are presented and discussed, as are also the influences of structural features of the processed titanium alloys on surface qualities of the investigated samples. The results showed that the highest resistance to AWJ machining exhibited the Ti6Al4V alloy prepared by forward extrusion. Its declination angle (recalculated to the thickness 10 mm to compare all the studied samples) was 12.33 degrees at the traverse speed of 100 mm/min, pumping pressure of 380 MPa, and abrasive mass flow rate of 250 g/min.