An investigation of quality in CO2 laser cutting of aluminum

Aluminum alloys are widely used in the aeronautics industry and nowadays have become of importance to the automotive industry as well. This paper investigates experimentally the quality of laser cutting for the aluminum alloy AA5083, with the use of a pulsed CO2 1.8 kW laser cutting system. The quality of the cut has been monitored by measuring the kerf width, the edge roughness and the size of the heat-affected zone (HAZ). This work aims at evaluating processing parameters, such as the laser power, the scanning speed, the pulsing frequency and the gas pressure, for the laser cutting of aluminum alloys. A statistical analysis of the results has been performed in order for the effect of each parameter on the cutting quality to be determined. The regression analysis has been used for the development of empirical models able to describe the effect of the process parameters on the quality of laser cutting. (C) 2009 CIRP.