ABSTRACT

The present paper is related to the development of a cutting system based on water jet with directly injected abrasives (DIA-jet). DIA-jet intends to cut rock bolts during mining works. In order to optimize the design of the jet nozzle and the abrasive tank, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) were used to obtain the behavior of the liquid-solid two-phase flow inside the nozzle and abrasive tank where the intense liquid-solid interactions took place. Based on numerical analyses, better understanding of the two-phase flow was achieved and the optimal parameters, including length of the jet nozzle, positions and numbers of the water orifices, as well as their relation to the slurry outlet on the abrasive tank, were obtained. Finally, performance of the water jet cutting system designed based on the optimized parameters from the numerical simulation was experimentally verified.