Laser Assisted Micro-Machining System Design And Simulation Method

Recently innovations in micro-manufacturing are enabling the fabrication of micro-and meso-scale structures and devices in a wide range of engineering materials. Such as alloy steel, engineering ceramics, fiber reinforced metal composite material. However, the part feature accuracy and material removal rate in micro-milling of such difficult-to-machine materials are limited by the machine-tool system stiffness (especially for small foot print machines) and low flexural stiffness and strength of the micro-tools normally used. Also, rapid tool wear is a problem since it negatively impacts part feature accuracy and finish. One approach to overcome these limitations is to use laser assisted micro-cutting of hard-to-machine materials. Laser-assisted micro-cutting is a composite processing method, the laser beam is focused in front of the cutting edge surface, the material is softened due to high temperature locally, thereby reducing the strength and hardness of the workpiece material and the cutting force of micro-machining.In this paper, based on laser-assisted micro-machining hard-to-machine materials principles to design laser-assisted micro-turning system, and applying commercial finite element software ABAQUS to build a thermal model thermal analysis for laser heating of micro turning Ti-6A1-4V material. Meanwhile establishing micro-turning explicit dynamic analysis coupled temp-displacement model for laser-assisted micro-machining process. The results show that the laser power on the temperature distribution, heat affected zone and softening layer depth have the most obvious effects. Laser heating obviously improves the Ti-6al-4v material micro machining performance. When the heating temperature is increased, it will cause the cutting stress-reducing and stress gradients have decreasing trend. Appropriate increase cutting thickness to improve the machining efficiency is more noticeable and little influence on the quality of processing surface. During Micro-cutting process, the cutting area stress will be reduced with the increasing cutting speed, and it is beneficial to micro-machining. When the speed rise to a certain value, the stress in the cutting zone will increases with speed increasing, the difficulty of cutting is improved, and also processing surface quality will be affected by different degree.