Abrasive water jet (AWJ) cutting is a green machining and processing technology that has found extensive applications. In this study, a well-designed cutting tool with multiple AWJ nozzles has been developed to determine the rotary multi-pass cutting depth on steel pipes that are used in petroleum industries. Experimentally, the multi-pass AWJ cutting depth is found to increase with pump pressure, nozzle diameter, and number of nozzles, but decrease with standoff distance. Also, the multi-pass cutting depth initially increases with rotation speed of the AWJ cutting tool or volumetric concentration of abrasive, and then begins to decline when rotation speed or volumetric concentration reaches a certain value. Mathematically, an empirical model is formulated to determine the rotary cutting depth initiated by multiple cutting passes based on the energy conservation theory. There exists a good agreement between the experimentally measured and theoretically calculated cutting depths with a percentage average absolute deviation of 7.0 per cent.

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