Assessment of the influence of abrasive water jet drilling parameters on glass fiber-reinforced polymer composites

English (OpenAlex)

In this study, the effect of abrasive waterjet (AWJ) drilling of glass fiber-reinforced polymer (GFRP) composites (0°/90° fiber orientations) on the kerf taper ( T ) and roundness error ( Re ) of the holes was investigated. The experiments were carried out using an abrasive waterjet designed with a Taguchi L 16 orthogonal array. The following waterjet processing parameters were selected: water pressure, stand-off distance, and feed rate. Statistical analyses were conducted using analysis of variance (ANOVA), signal-to-noise (S/N) ratios, and Taguchi-based gray relational analysis (GRA) to investigate the effects of processing parameters on kerf taper and roundness error. An Artificial Neural Network (ANN) model was created for the estimation of the experimental data, and the generated model was executed with minimum error and maximum accuracy. The analysis revealed that water pressure was the most influential parameter, contributing 87.75% to Re and 85.15% to T , followed by stand-off distance (11.00% for Re and 13.02% for T ). Based on the parameters selected through GRA, the optimum conditions (5300 bar water pressure, 1 mm stand-off distance, 3000 mm/min traverse feed rate, 10 mm hole diameter) produced a minimum Re of 0.709 mm and a T of 0.420°.