posted on Mar, 5 2011 @ 03:11 PM
reply to post by Aristophrenia
Water laser????? If you are talking about water jet cutting machines, the water is not what does the cutting its the finely granulated abrasive
material, garnet, that does the cutting, the water is just the carrier medium.
And they are very very slow cutting once you get above a certain thickness, but above a certain thickness they do surpass cutting lasers only because
the power requirements for such a laser are tremendous.
water jets also use a tremendous amount of power themselves, the pumps are driven by up to 100hp electric motors. They are aslo very expensive to run
and maintain, a business associate would spend $10-12k dollars a month on electricity and maintenance for his water jet machine.
And for cutting very thick steel there is no replacing oxy/acetelyne flame cutting for thickness and speed.