Insights of abrasive water jet polishing process characteristics and its advancements

Nowadays, Abrasive water jet (AWJ) machining is used in the manufacturing Industries as cutting, turning, milling and drilling processes. The application of this technology is further extended into polishing application. However, the cutting nature of the AWJ have produced the inappropriate surface conditions. Recently, the hybrid AWJ namely, Ultrasonic Assisted Abrasive Water Jet Polishing (UAAWJP) is mainly developed for polishing the complex shapes and the internal features of both metal and non-metals. Compared with other polishing technologies, UAAWJP has several advantages such as improvement in performance efficiency, higher kinetic energy, better surface quality, high precision, ease to control and absence of thermal distortions. The hybrid process is involved with variety of factors such as ultrasonic waves (frequency and vibration), abrasive particle type &size, jet pressure, traverse rate, abrasive mass flow rate, standoff distance, nozzle geometry, jet impact angle and processing time. However, the usage of conventional AWJ and UAAWJP techniques is scarce due to the lack of understanding of process mechanism and technical publications. It is mentioned that review article on AWJ polishing operations has not been published till date. Therefore, the present work is deals with the insights of previous studies on AWJ polishing and it advancements particularly in UAAWJP, and the results are presented with in view of process mechanism, features, benefits, effects and applications, and the results are also compared with other polishing techniques. The outcome of this study can also provide the better understanding and confident to the researchers and scientists on UAAWJP for further advancements and applications on it.