Paper Details

Laser beam machining (LBM) is one of the most widely used thermal energy based non-contacttype advance machining process which can be applied for almost whole range of materials. This work studiedthe performance of fiber laser cutting of mild steel. The experiment was focused on the cut quality withsurface roughness and kerf width with two assistant gases pressure. After analysis the cutting result, severalconclusions were made. Although the best result got in the experiment is not perfect as predicted, the wholeresult of the test can be accepted. This work an application of the grey relational analysis (GRA) to directlyoptimize laser cutting of a mild steel sheet using two performance characteristics. From twenty sevenexperiments based on the orthogonal array of L27, an O2 pressure of 1 bar, a N2 pressure of 15 bar, and a laserpower of 1100 watt were found to be the best parameters for laser cutting of a mild steel with two assistantgases pressure. Moreover, the analysis of variance (ANOVA) is also employed to determine the contributionof each control parameter on the cut quality characteristics. The three largest measured contributions on thecut quality in decreasing order are the O2 pressure, the N2 pressure, and the laser power. The optimalcombination from both the GRA and the Taguchi methods from 27 experiments is the same. Finally,confirmation experiments are performed to ensure the robustness of the GRA predicted optimal configurationfor laser cutting of mild steel. Compared with single assist gas laser, a higher cutting speed was achieved byfiber laser with two assistant gases pressure.

Vipul K Shah, Mr. Hardik J Patel, Dr. Dhaval M Patel, “Optimization using GRA for MS Grade through Fiber Laser Cutting Process”, International Journal of Advance Engineering and Research Development (IJAERD), Vol. 1, Issue 3, pp. 329-335, March 2014.