Abrasive water jet cutting is a recent advanced machining process effectively used for machining several materials irrespective of hardness. MONEL K500 is hard to machine material used for various high temperature components like aircraft engine components, turbine blades, missiles, components for supercritical power plants etc. Non-traditional machining methods are more suitable for the machining of these kinds of hard alloys and abrasive water jet machining are highly preferred and found suitable for machining these materials in several industries. The multi-response process parameter optimization in abrasive water jet machining of MONEL K500 using composite desirability function analysis is carried out in this work. The significant process parameters are standoff distance, speed rate and abrasive flow rate. The responses considered in this work are surface roughness, material removal rate and kerf width. The individual desirability functions of all responses are considered and the weightages of each response are assigned to calculate the composite desirability. The higher composite desirability value provides the optimum process parameters and they are validated. ANOVA analysis and S/N plots for the responses and the composite desirability function are also carried out to predict the high influencing parameters while machining MONEL K500.

Keywords: MONEL K500, Composite desirability, ANOVA, Multi objective optimization.