Study On Laser Cutting Of High Modulus Carbon Fiber Reinforced Plastic

With the development of Space Technology, the requirements of the lightweight design of satellite structure are becoming much higher. High modulus carbon fiber reinforced plastic(CFRP), with the advantages of high specific modulus and high specific strength, becomes the first choice for the structure of the satellite. However, the processing performance of CFRP is poor. The main processing method, at present, is traditional mechanical processing method. Due to its low efficiency, high cost and poor machining quality, this method limits the application of the high modulus CFRP. In order to solve this problem, this paper studied the laser cutting properties of the high modulus CFRP.Firstly, taking the structure characteristics of high modulus CFRP into account, the interactional processes of the infrared laser with CFRP and UV laser with CFRP were studied separately in this paper. Research on The main removal ways of CFRP under different cutting conditions were investigated and the cutting principle of pulsed laser was studied in details.Secondly, in order to study the influences of the laser paramenters on the cutting quality of CFRP with infrared laser, the laser cutting process was simulated by ANSYS. In the simulation process, the Gauss Surface Heat Model and the geomtry model of CFRP, as well as the boundries during processing were developed. This paper studied the effects of the parametes on the processing qualities including the depth and diameter of the hole, and the width of the heat affected zone that generated during laser processing using different heating loads. Furthermore, the correctness of the model is verified by experiment.Thirdly, this paper made evaluation standards of laser cutting quality, studied the experiments of laser cutting high modulus CFRP using infrared laser and UV laser respectively. The influence of scanning direction, frequency, pulse engery, pulse width, gas pressure on the qualities including the kerf width, kerf taple, the width of heat affected zone with infrared laser cutting of high modulus CFRP were all investigated. In addition, the influence of scanning direction, scanning speed, average power on the the qualities including kerf width and kerf taple with the UV laser cutting were studied.Lastly, in order to improve the cutting quality of infrared laser processing of high modulus CFRP, the central composite rotation orthogonal design was employed to design the experiments. During this process, five factors including frequency, pulse width, scanning speed, pulse energy, gas pressure were taken into account, five levels were performed in the respond surface method(RSM). According to these results, the effect of interaction between different paraments on the cutting qualities was discussed. Additionally, the smallest heat affected zone, kerf width were optimized by the Process Parameters Optimization respectively. A good processing quality was obtained using the optimizated parameters.