The Effects of Femtosecond Laser Processing on the Surface Accuracy of Fibre Laser Clad Sidewalls
R. Li, X-J. Yang, W. Zhao, B. He, H-L. Zhao and W-Y. Zhu
To enhance the surface accuracy of laser metal direct forming pieces, a method applying femtosecond laser to fabricate the cladding sidewalls is proposed in this paper. The effects of laser fluence, scanning speed and scanning strategy on the processing accuracy are studied systematically. The experimental results show that when the laser fluence increases, the roughness of cladding sidewalls also increases. The roughness of the cladding sidewall is decreased firstly and then increased with the increasing scanning speed. When the laser fluence is between 0.12 and 0.34 J/ cm2, the roughness of cladding sidewall is less than 3 μm. What is more, under single scanning strategy the sidewalls roughness is less than that when back and forth scanning method is used.
Keywords: Femtosecond laser, fibre laser, laser cladding, sidewalls, surface accuracy, ultrafast lasers, rapid manufacturing, ablation, roughness