Multi Criteria Decision Making of Abrasive Flow Oriented Process Parameters in Abrasive Water Jet Machining Using Taguchi-DEAR Methodology

Owing to its ability of machining higher strength materials such as titanium alloy with less heat affected zone and higher material removal rate, abrasive water jet machining process is widely used in manufacturing industries. Since the process associated with more than one performance measure, it is important to introduce the multiple response decision making for optimizing the process parameters in the process. The experimental trials have been conducted under Taguchi based L-9 orthogonal table with different levels of input process parameters such as liquid water pressure, abrasive particles flow rate, feed rate and stand-off distance. Taguchi - Data Envelopment Analysis based Ranking based multiple response decision making has been used to enhance the performance measures such as surface roughness and material removal rate in the present study. From the experimental results, the optimal process parameters have been computed among the selected input process parameters. It has also been found that standoff distance has higher influence on determining the performance measures owing to its importance on determining impact energy in the process.