Experimental Investigation on Gas Laser Cutting

Laser beam cutting (LBC) is a most predominantly used non-traditional cutting process to cut desired shapes out of sheet metals, plates, sections and boxes with greater accuracy at least time. The criticality in this process is its complexity in cutting non ferrous materials due to their lesser absorption rate of the laser beam. Continuous wave CO2 laser and pulsed Nd:YAG laser are the most commonly used methods for cutting of non ferrous metal sheets. This experiment investigates the effect of input parameters Laser power (kW), Cutting speed (m/min), Assist gas pressure (bar) and Nozzle standoff distance (mm) on different responses like surface roughness (Ra in μm), kerf width (Kw in mm), dimensional deviation (Dd in mm) and hole diameter (Hd in mm). This entire experiment is designed using Taguchi L9 Orthogonal Array (OA) technique. The data collected are analyzed with the aid of Multiple Regression Analysis (MRA) and Grey Relational Analysis (GRA). The optimized results obtained out of GRA are tested by performing a confirmation experiment.