water is possible for soft materials, the addition of an abrasive turned the waterjet into a modern machining tool for all materials. This began in 1935 when the idea of adding an abrasive to the water stream was developed by Elmo Smith for liquid abrasive blasting. Smith’s design was further refined by Leslie Tirrell of the Hydroblast Corporation in 1937, resulting in a nozzle design that created a mix of high-pressure water and abrasive for the purpose of wet blasting. The first publications on modern abrasive waterjet (AWJ) cutting were published by Mohamed Hashish in the 1982 BHR proceedings showing, for the first time, that waterjets with relatively small amounts of abrasives are capable of cutting hard materials such as steel and concrete. The March 1984 issue of the Mechanical Engineering magazine showed more details and materials cut with AWJ such as titanium, aluminium, glass, and stone. Mohamed Hashish was awarded a patent on forming AWJ in 1987. Hashish, who also coined the new term abrasive waterjet, and his team continued to develop and improve the AWJ technology and its hardware for many applications which is now in over 50 industries worldwide. A critical development was creating a durable mixing tube that could withstand the power of the high-pressure AWJ, and it was Boride Products (now Kennametal) development of their ROCTEC line of ceramic tungsten carbide composite tubes that significantly increased the operational life of the AWJ nozzle. Current work on AWJ nozzles is on micro abrasive waterjets so that cutting with jets smaller than in diameter can be commercialized. Working with Ingersoll-Rand Waterjet Systems, Michael Dixon implemented the first production practical means of cutting titanium sheets—an abrasive waterjet system very similar to those in widespread use today. By January 1989, that system was being run 24 hours a day producing titanium parts for the B-1B largely at Rockwell's North American Aviation facility in Newark, Ohio. Today, there are two different types of Abrasive Waterjets: Abrasive Water Suspension Jet (AWSJ) cutting The Abrasive Water Suspension Jet (AWSJ) - often called “Slurry Jet” or “Water Abrasive Suspension (WAS) jet” - is a specific type of abrasive water jet, which is used for waterjet cutting. In contrast to the abrasive water injector jet (AWIJ), the abrasive water suspension jet (AWSJ) is characterised by the fact that the mixing of abrasive and water takes place before the nozzle. This has the effect that,