Experimental and numerical investigation on laser beam forming of steel sheets

Laser beam forming process being a non-contact process requires no hard tooling systems and presses. Hence, it is considered suitable for low-volume and high-variety production of sheet metal parts for different industrial applications. This paper reports on the experimental and finite element-based numerical investigation of the laser beam forming process. The experimental setup for the investigation includes an Nd: YAG laser with a maximum power of 4.4kW and adjustable beam diameter. The L-27 Taguchi Orthogonal Array Design of Experiment was employed in this study in order to identify the variables that mostly influence the outcome of the experiment. The optimised process parameter window employed for the laser beam forming process was further classified into the minimum, medium and maximum parameter window settings. The finite element analysis was performed using the commercial package ANSYS to validate the experimental results. This investigation was able to validate the response related to deformation and identify the effect of the laser power on the bending angle for the mild steel sheets used in this study. The finite element models were parametrically developed using the ANSYS Parametric Design Language, the scripting language provided in ANSYS version 14.0. The maximum variation in the bending angle between the experiment and the finite element simulation was 9%, recorded at the maximum parameter setting during the laser beam forming process. The results showed that there was a strong correlation between the numerical and the experimental results.