Sheet Metal Laser Bending Process Of Numerical Simulation And Experimental Study

Laser forming is a recently developed and highly flexible metal forming process. It uses laser-induced thermal stress to shape a metal workpiece without hard tooling or external forces. It is especially apply for forming single product or small quantity manufactured products, which makes it promising in shipbuilding, automobile, aerospace, microelectronic industries and so on.In this paper, the 3-D thermo-mechanical coupled finite element (FE) model of laser bending of moderately thick shipbuilding steel plate is optimized that is built up using the software MSC.Marc. Corresponding experiments are performed to evaluate the accuracy of the simulation. The FE simulated results agree well with experimental results. An optimized coupled model is built up that describes the bending process in a steel plate following multiple-irradiation of laser. The temperature, displacement and stress distribution are simulated use the model. Some rules in the process are summarized and the reasons are analyzed according to the simulated results.Experiments and simulation related to the laser bending of steel plates with larger dimension are carried out. The difficulties and problems should be resolved in simulation are discussed. The temperature, the displacement and the stress fields are calculated using the founded model. The factors influent precision of simulation are discussed and the reason why the distortion trend of different thick plates are not consistent are explained by the calculated residual stress distribution.In addition, laser bending experiments of 2mm-thick OT4 titanium alloy thin plate are performed and the influence of laser parameters on the final bending angle are investigated.