Laser cutting had been widely used in the material processing field with the increase of the requirements on the quality and work efficiency. As to the laser cutting, there had many factors that could affect the quality of cuts. Among them, the chemical composition played an important role because laser processing was a kind of interaction among laser beam, shielding gas and materials. Compared with the other element, silicon element had a deleterious effect on the laser processing which resulted in cuts with a dross and brittleness in the welded seam. However, many kinds of steel with high amount of silicon need to be processed by laser technology in recent years. In this paper, the influence of silicon element on the quality of laser cutting and laser welding was discussed. Continuous CO₂ laser was used to cut and weld materials with different amount of silicon. Results showed that with the increase amount of silicon, the speed of laser cutting and laser welding decreased in order to obtain the good cuts and welds. Silicon had the obvious influence on the laser processing technology and quality. Microstructure of the laser welds for materials with high amount of silicon was also analyzed in this paper.

Date Published: 13 January 2005
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 5629, Lasers in Material Processing and Manufacturing II, (13 January 2005); doi: 10.1117/12.568047

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 5629:
Lasers in Material Processing and Manufacturing II
ShuShen Deng; Akira Matsunawa; Y. Lawrence Yao; Minlin Zhong, Editor(s)