Waterjet rough finishing of stone surface

The paper deals with the assessment of the potential application of plain waterjet for surface treatment of stone materials as an alternative to technologies traditionally employed for this task, like bush-hammering, sand-blasting and flaming.Waterjetting has been already proposed in the market for rough finishing of surfaces making use of a fast rotating head provided with multiple nozzles. At the University of Cagliari considerable research has already been carried out using either abrasive or plain waterjet, stationary or pulsed, generated through a fan-type nozzle aiming at obtaining an evenly treated surface.Aparticular goal of the tests described in the paper is that of developing a technique enabling to make engravings on the stone in order to achieve special aesthetic effects. The experimental results obtained on a broad set of rocks show that the technology is viable on both technical and economic grounds, allowing to obtain excellent results at a relatively low processing cost by resorting to multiple line nozzles.