Water jet cutting systems

Waterjet cutting on a waterjet cutting machine uses water, a medium compressed under high pressure, to cut a wide variety of materials. This is a good alternative in cases where a flame cutting process such as laser or plasma cutting is not suitable for cutting the materials. A particular advantage of waterjet cutting is that there is very little heating and therefore no material distortion of the workpiece to be cut.

With a high-pressure pump, water is compressed to a pressure of 4000 to 6000 bar and conveyed via a complex pipe system to one or more waterjet cutting heads of the waterjet cutting system. At the cutting head, the high pressure is accelerated into an extremely high jet velocity of up to 1000m/s. The water is then pumped to the cutting head. Depending on the material to be cut, the pure water jet or the abrasive water jet is used. With pure water cutting technology, the pure water jet primarily cuts soft materials such as foams, rubber, paper, wood, fabrics, food, etc.

In the abrasive cutting technique, a fine abrasive (a type of sand) is added to the pure water jet and an abrasive water jet with very high pressure is produced. The abrasive water jet works at several times the speed of sound. Therefore, it is possible to cut even the hardest materials such as steel, stone, ceramics, glass, composites, titanium, aluminum, stainless steel, hardened steel, etc. without any problems.