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

SBIR 第一阶段：低成本磨料水射流切割机的液压系统设计

• 批准号: 1621956
• 负责人: Matthew Nowicki
• 金额: $ 22.5万
• 依托单位: WAZER INC.
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2017
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2017-01-01 至 2018-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1621956&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: SBIR; Phase; Hydraulic; System; Design

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.

SBIR第一期项目旨在通过完全重新设计机器的核心部件来满足消费者的预算需求，从而将磨料水射流切割的工业先进制造方法带给个人消费者。该项目与当前缩小先进制造技术(如激光切割和3D打印)以适应不断增长的桌面制造市场的趋势相一致。不幸的是，目前可用于消费市场的桌面数字制造工具仅限于生产塑料和木材等软材料的商品。磨料水射流切割的最大优势是它能够切割各种材料，包括塑料、金属、石材、陶瓷、玻璃和复合材料。随着这项技术最终被更广泛的受众所接受，从中学机器人专家到创意企业家，到制作人空间，到工匠，再到小企业，每个人都将能够在目前可用的各种板材中以数字方式创建物理设计。目前的商业水射设计运行在高压区域，使得零部件对消费市场来说昂贵得令人望而却步。为了使这项技术对大众可行，它必须适应较低的压力空间，以利用整个机器所需的组件成本节约。首先，通过设计和执行测试矩阵来创建新的低压磨料水射流切割性能模型，该测试矩阵将确定各种水射流参数(水压、水流量、磨料流量等)对切割性能的影响。有了这样的理解，系统的核心，即液压泵，将根据目前不用于水射流切割的泵结构进行调整和定制。最后，我们对水射流S切割头(喷出水和磨料的高速混合物的组件)进行了彻底的重新设计，采用了低成本的材料、制造工艺和专为低压切割而优化的独特几何形状。