Investigation of the CO2 Laser Cutting of Glass Woven Fabrics

The laser cutting process is one of the most established processes and has a great number of applications in the automotive, aerospace, shipbuilding and material processing industries. It can be used for several processes such as cutting, engraving and welding for metals and nonmetals. This book investigates experimentally the quality of laser cutting for the Glass Woven Fabrics (GWF) composite material, with the use of a continuous wave carbon dioxide (CO2) laser (10.6m wavelength). A CO2 laser was used to cut 4 mm thickness of GWF panels. The quality of the cut has been monitored by measuring the Kerf Width (KW) and Material Removal Rate (MRR). This work aims at evaluating processing parameters, such as the laser power, cutting speed, stand-off distance and air pressure, for the laser cutting of GWF. For the experimental design, the Taguchi method and ANOVA has been used, in which the experiments are performed as per standard orthogonal arrays (OA) while the optimum level of input process parameters are decided on the basis of a statistical analysis of the experimental results.