Laser processing of aluminium sheets with low heat related deformations for deep drawing

Abstract

Manufacturing with nanosecond pulsed lasers is one of the most efficient ablation processes and applied in the field of micro production. Previous studies showed that pulse durations within the nanosecond range introduce heating in thin materials. This study presents the influence of different scanning strategies on heat accumulation during processing of Aluminium foils, which are used for deep drawing operations. It is found that the processing of webs line by line causes more distortions in the web structure and that a helical path processing from the outer region of the web to the inside results in higher heat accumulation. Distortion and heat accumulation are reduced if the multi-pass scanning strategy is used.