Magnetic property analysis in non-oriented silicon iron steels cut through water jet technology

Water jet technology that uses abrasive particles is an efficient cutting method, for electrical steels and it has many advantages, by comparison with the classical punching. During the cutting process there are not any heating phenomena and the method has a high versatility with a minimum applied stress on the work piece. There were tested strip samples of M400-50A, M400-65A, M700-50A and M700-65A electrical steel grades cut through water jet technology. The samples' length is equal to 300 mm and their width is set to 30, 15, 10, 7.5 and 5 mm. The magnetic property measurements were performed with a laboratory single strip tester (SST), which can characterize only samples with an area of 300 mm × 30 mm. Thus, to reconstruct the standard width of 30 mm, there were put side by side 2, 3, 4 and 6 pieces with the same width. The magnetic quantities were investigated at 1000 mT in the frequency range 10 ÷ 100 Hz. This type of non-conventional cutting method proves to have a low influence on the energy losses with respect to the increase of the cutting perimeter, because during the cutting process the edge damage is limited to a very narrow width.