Effect of operating parameters on plate bending by laser line heating

Abstract

Laser line heating is a plate bending technique. It is produced due to the heating effect of a laser beam when irradiated over a suitable heating path. In this work, the effect on angular deformation under different operating parameters, such as energy (in terms of laser power), scanning speed and number of passes along with the thickness of the substrate material, was studied under straight line scanning schemes. In this experiment, CO2 laser has been used and the substrate material used is the mild steel sheet. The effect of each operating parameter was taken into account to find the optimum process parameter. The design of experiment has been applied with the help of Taguchi method, and the results were obtained and analysed with the help of analysis of variance and Taguchi analysis (signal-to-noise ratio), for the determination of the optimized values of the operating parameters with their effect towards angular deformation in the process. A regression analysis also has also been performed to obtain a suitable co-relationship between bending angle and other operating parameters.