The potential of UHP and waterjets for additive manufacturing

Abstract

Additive manufacturing (AM) is the fastest growing manufacturing technology today with significant funds being spent on many of its aspects worldwide. However, parts made by AM may still need post processing to enhance their characteristics such as density or surface attributes. This papers focuses on metallic parts made by AM and mostly on post processing. While WJ and AWJ are subtractive processes, they can potentially complement AM with several post processing operations such as peening, surface finishing, cleaning, and surface texturing. Also, UHP used to create WJs may be used for densification of AM parts. It was found that cold isostatic pressing (CIP) at pressures of 650 MPa results in almost full densification of copperbased metals made by AM. This has a significant advantage in eliminating the heating process for many metallic parts. However, higher temperatures may still be needed for densification of harder metals which is an area under investigation. The use of waterjets and cavitation for peening has been demonstrated on many metallic materials such as Titanium and Aluminum. Texturing for adhesive bonding using plain waterjets proved to be more advantageous than grit blasting.