Advantages and disadvantages of laser cutting machine and other thermal cutting

The laser cutting machine for handicrafts mainly uses the focused high-power density laser beam to irradiate the workpiece, so that the irradiated material can melt, vaporize, ablate or reach the ignition point rapidly. At the same time, the molten material can be blown out by the high-speed air flow coaxial with the beam, so as to realize the workpiece cutting. Laser cutting is one of the hot cutting methods.

Compared with other thermal cutting methods, the laser cutting machine for handicrafts has the advantages of fast cutting speed and high quality. It can be summarized as follows.

Good cutting quality: due to small laser spot, high energy density and fast cutting speed, laser cutting can obtain better cutting quality. ① The laser cutting cuts are thin and narrow, both sides of the cutting seam are parallel and perpendicular to the surface, and the dimension accuracy of the cutting parts can reach ± 0.05mm. ② The cutting surface is clean and beautiful, and the surface roughness is only tens of microns. Even laser cutting can be used as the last process, without machining, and parts can be used directly. ③ After laser cutting, the width of the heat affected zone is very small, and the performance of the material near the cutting seam is almost unaffected. Moreover, the deformation of the workpiece is small, the cutting accuracy is high, the geometry of the cutting seam is good, and the cross section of the cutting seam presents a regular rectangle. The comparison of laser cutting, oxyacetylene cutting and plasma cutting methods is shown in Table 1. The cutting material is 6.2mm thick low carbon steel plate.

High cutting efficiency: due to the transmission characteristics of laser, laser cutting machine is generally equipped with multiple CNC worktables, the whole cutting process can be fully CNC. During the operation, only changing the numerical control program can be applied to the cutting of parts with different shapes, which can not only carry out two-dimensional cutting, but also realize three-dimensional cutting.

Fast cutting speed: use laser with power of 1200W to Cut 2mm thick low carbon steel plate, the cutting speed can reach 600cm / min; cut 5mm thick polypropylene resin plate, the cutting speed can reach 1200cm / min. The material does not need to be clamped and fixed in laser cutting, which not only saves the fixture, but also saves the auxiliary time of loading and unloading.

Non contact cutting: during laser cutting, the cutting torch has no contact with the workpiece, and there is no tool wear. When machining parts with different shapes, it is not necessary to change the "tool", but only to change the output parameters of the laser. The laser cutting process has low noise, small vibration and no pollution.

There are many kinds of cutting materials: compared with oxyacetylene cutting and plasma cutting, there are many kinds of laser cutting materials, including metal, non-metal, metal base and non-metal base composite materials, leather, wood and fiber, etc. However, for different materials, due to their own thermophysical properties and different laser absorption, they show different laser cutting adaptability.