On Productivity of Abrasive Water Jet Machining for Miniature Gear Manufacturing

Quality, productivity, and sustainability are three major indicators to evaluate the performance of any manufacturing process. Abrasive water jet machining (AWJM), which is an advanced or nonconventional machining process possess numerous benefits over conventional and other advanced processes for manufacturing of precision engineering components. Material removal rate directly indicates about the process productivity, and often finds contradictory to quality and sustainability. This paper reports the productivity of AWJM process while manufacturing miniature gears of brass. It is a part of experimental investigation conducted to manufacture high quality miniature brass gears using AWJM process. Taguchi L9 orthogonal array based experimental study where a total of nine experiments with two replicates each was conducted to evaluate the effect of AWJM parameters on miniature gear quality, process productivity and sustainability. AWJM parameters were optimized to enhance material removal rate and an optimum value of 18.80 mm³/min was obtained. Furthermore, AWJM was identified as a superior to conventional machining processes for manufacturing of miniature gears.