Instrument/Equipment Core/Facility: Advanced Prototyping Center at Wright Lab

Abrasive water jet cutting

Flow NanoJet

A large, boothlike apparatus stands behind a portable computer monitor & keyboard

Our abrasive waterjet cutter is a 40kW, 6000 bar, fully enclosed machine with a cutting area of 100cm x 60 cm. In principle, anything up to about 10 cm thick can be cut, but there some limitations on what we may cut for safety reasons, and others that do not yield good results.
 

Capabilities

  • Cuts material up to 10 cm thick
  • ~10 μm positioning accuracy
  • 1.2 m x 0.65 m cutting area
  • Nozzle rises up to 15 cm vertically
  • 0.02 mm / 0.3 m linear straightness accuracy
 
Acceptable materialsUnacceptable materialsDifficult materials
  • Aluminium
  • Steel
  • Copper
  • Tungsten
  • Rock
  • Glass
  • PTFE
  • Anything that can't go down the drain
  • Lead
  • Cadmium
  • Brittle
  • Layered (like fibreglass)
  • Water sensitive
  • Too soft

Design requirements

Your base material must have enough room around the part that you want to cut out so that it can be securely clamped down. You should have 5 cm of clearance along 2 edges for this.

We have two nozzles available, and their cutting "beams" have a diameters of about 1 mm and 0.4mm. Internal corners sharper than that are not possible, and very fine features can be tricky.

James A. Nikkel, PhD