SBIR Phase I: Hydraulic System Design for a Low-cost Abrasive Waterjet Cutter

This SBIR Phase I project aims to bring the industrial advanced manufacturing method of abrasive waterjet cutting to individual consumers by fully redesigning the core components of the machine to meet the budgetary needs of a consumer. This project parallels the current movement of scaling down advance manufacturing techniques such as laser cutting and 3D printing to the growing desktop fabrication market. Unfortunately, the desktop digital fabrication tools currently available to consumer market are restricted to producing goods in only soft materials like plastics, and wood. The biggest advantage of abrasive waterjet cutting is its cutting ability in a wide range of materials including plastics, metals, stone, ceramics, glass, and composites. With this technology finally accessible to a wider audience, everyone from the middle school robotocist, to a creative entrepreneur, to the makerspaces, to artisans, to small businesses will be able to digitally create physical designs in the full gambit of sheet materials that are currently available. Current commercial waterjet designs operate in a high pressure region that makes components prohibitively expensive for the consumer market. To make the technology viable for the masses it must be adapted to a lower pressure space to leverage the necessary component cost savings across the machine. This starts by creating a new performance model for low-pressure abrasive waterjet cutting through the design and execution of a test matrix that will determine how cutting performance is affected by various waterjet parameters (water pressure, water flow rate, abrasive flow rate, etc.). With this understanding, the heart of the system, the hydraulic pump, will be adapted and customized from a pump construction that is not currently used for waterjet cutting. Lastly, this effort concludes with a ground-up redesign of the waterjet?s Cutting Head (the assembly that ejects the high velocity mixture of water and abrasive) utilizing low-cost materials, manufacturing processes and a unique geometry optimized for low-pressure cutting.