Title:

Environmental and Economic Life Cycle Assessments of Water Droplet Processing and Traditional Waterjet Cutting

Waterjet metal manufacturing is a modern process of cutting metal with high-speed waters and usually abrasive. Although the mix of water and abrasive helps productivity with these machines, the use of abrasives has been linked to both large environmental burdens and high operating costs which brings debate of whether the process can be done better. New design approaches such as the Water Droplet Machining (WDM) may be an opportunity to perform the same tasks with less environmental impacts and costs over the machine’s lifetime. The use of a comparative life cycle and life cycle cost assessment is performed to determine which waterjet is more beneficial to the environment and cost efficient. The results portray higher environmental and economic impacts when comparing the WDM with the AWJ per functional unit. Further sensitivity analyses give insight on the most sensitive input for the waterjets. The abrasive rate for the AWJ represented the most sensitive input whereas the machine lifetime and electricity usage are the most sensitive inputs for the WDM. These results give valuable information to best optimize the design of modern waterjet technologies and give insight on the potential for new systems to be more environmentally and cost efficient.

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