Investigations of laser forming techniques of copper metal sheet

Abstract

Laser forming is an advanced manufacturing which is widely used in automotive and manufacturing industry by deforming metallic and non-metallic sheets. In this process, a continuous fiber laser is irradiated over Copper Metal sheet. As the laser beam imbibed over the sheet, a step temperature thermal gradient got induced across the thickness of the sheet. The bending moments due to uneven thermal stresses leads to the deformation of the sheet without using any external forces. This paper shows the experiments performed on Copper Metal sheets of dimension 64mm×45mm with a maximum power of 50W. The process parameters which were varied are number of passes (10 to 30), power (30W to 45W) to get the maximum bending angle with a uniform spot diameter of 1mm. The study between variations of the bending angle with process parameters is done. After this the characterization of the samples was done using optical microscope, XRD analysis, micro-hardness, tensile test and SEM