Experimental Study on Fiber Laser Microcutting of Nimonic 263 Superalloy

Laser cutting of NIMONIC 263 sheet was investigated by using a 100 W Yb:YAG fiber laser. The study was divided in two phases. In the first one, the critical cutting speeds were found fixing the average power (80 W), changing the pulse duration, the cutting speed, the nozzle diameter and the focus position. Then, a full factorial design was adopted according to the DoE methodology. In order to determine which of the process parameters affect the kerf geometry and how, Analysis Of Variance (ANOVA) was used. Experimental results show the possibility to obtain kerf characterized by narrow width and low taper angle values.