Experimental investigation on abrasive water jet polishing of stainless steel: a preliminary study

Abrasive water jet (AWJ) is a versatile machining technique for the production of components in various applications. In this paper, AWJ machining technique is extended to polishing operations on stainless steel 304. The polishing operations were carried out in the OMAX-AWJ machining centre by controlling the process parameters, namely, the traverse rate and the abrasive mesh size. The single and double pass roster method was considered for the production of polished surface by AWJ. In this study, in-depth analysis of 3D surface topography and surface morphology has been done on various polished surfaces. The experimental results indicated the yield of a surface texture with beneficial roughness features for the double pass jet operation through the employment of an abrasive mesh size of #300 and a traverse rate of 39.96 mm/min.