Laboratory for Manufacturing and Sustainability

Effective cleaning with high pressure waterjets requires direct impact of jets and sufficiently high impact pressure. The objective of this research is to find all such cleanable regions, given a CAD model of a workpiece, by means of geometric accessibility analysis. We use a configuration space (C-space) approach for addressing the problems of both optimum surface proximity for effective cleaning and collision avoidance between the cleaning lance and the workpiece. Minkowski sums are used to compute the C-spaces and cleanable regions are then found by visibility analysis. Implementations and results for 2D examples are shown to validate the approach.