Effect of laser beam cutting parameters on productivity and dimensional accuracy of miniature spur gears of stainless steel

Product quality and process productivity are one of the major indicators to evaluate the performance of any manufacturing process. The quality of any product covers its appearance, geometric and dimensional accuracy, and surface finish and integrity that majorly include microstructure, micro-hardness type of parameters. Whereas, the productivity can be determined using material removal rate. Laser beam cutting is an important advanced machining process and has been scarcely explored for miniature gears. This paper reports, the effect of laser beam cutting parameters on one of the quality parameters i.e. dimensional deviation of miniature spur gears of stainless steel and material removal rate. Box Behnken design of experiments methodology has been adopted to conduct a total of twenty nine experiments where four important laser parameters i.e. power, cutting speed, focal position, and gas pressure have been varied at three levels each. The manufactured external spur gear of stainless steel consists of ten teeth, 0.750 module, 9.04 mm outside diameter, and 4.5 mm face width or thickness. The investigation found that cutting speed significantly affected material removal rate and laser power affected dimensional deviation. Individual effects of laser parameters on both material removal rate and dimensional deviation are discussed in detail in the chapter. The investigation identifies laser beam cutting as a viable substitute of conventional manufacturing processes for fabrication of quality miniature gears with high productivity.