Angular Stability Margins for the Remote Fusion Cutting Process

The set of incident angles, that yields stable cuts when conducting remote fusion cutting (RFC), is of great importance when scheduling multiple cuts on a work piece. This is due to their ability to determine how much the laser beam can be moved by angling the cutting head instead of translating it. This paper investigates how the stability of the RFC process is affected by changing the incident angle when processing stainless steel sheets. This investigation was conducted as an experimental study in which the angle of incidence was decomposed into a work angle and a travel angle. The stability was evaluated by an automatic procedure based on images acquired by a programmable microscope and a computer vision algorithm developed in MATLAB. The results showed that the stability of the RFC process was dependent on the work and the travel angle. It was also seen that a coherent region of stable incident angles could be found. All experiments were conducted with a 3 kW single mode fiber laser at the laser processing laboratory at Aalborg University.