With the advent of the Industry 4.0 era, manufacturing equipment develops well. Laser cutting machines are widely used in various industrial fields. The cutting quality is the most intuitive way to judge the performance of laser cutting machine. So how do we judge the cutting quality?

1. Cutting roughness

The laser cutting section will form vertical lines. The depth of the lines determines the roughness of the cutting surface. The shallower the lines, the smoother the cutting section. Roughness not only affects the appearance of the edge, but also the friction characteristics. In most cases, the roughness needs to be kept as low as possible, so the shallower the grain, the higher the quality of the cut.

2. Cutting verticality

If the thickness of the sheet metal exceeds 10mm, the verticality of the cutting edge is important. When cutting is away from the focus point, the laser beam becomes divergent, and the cut becomes wider toward the top or bottom, depending on the location of the focus point. The cutting edge deviates from the vertical line by a few hundredths of a millimeter. The more vertical the edge, the higher the quality of the cutting.

3. Cutting width

Generally speaking, the cutting width does not affect the cutting quality. It only has an important impact when a particularly precise contour is formed inside the component. This is because the cutting width determines the minimum inner diameter of the contour.

When the thickness of the sheet increases, the cutting width also increases. Therefore, in order to ensure the same high accuracy, no matter how large the cutting width is, the workpiece should be constant in the processing area of the laser cutting machine.

4. Cutting texture

When the machine cuts thick plates at high speed, the molten metal will not appear in the kerf below the vertical laser beam, but will be ejected behind the laser beam. As a result, curved lines are formed on the cutting edge, and the lines closely follow the moving laser beam. To correct this problem, reducing the feed rate at the end of the cutting process can greatly eliminate the formation of lines.

5. Cut burrs

The formation of burrs is an important factor that determines the quality of laser cutting. The removal of burrs requires extra work, the severity and size of the burrs can intuitively judge the cutting quality.

6. Material deposition

The laser cutting machine first encounters a layer of oil-containing special liquid on the workpiece surface before starting to melt and punch holes. Gasification and various materials do not require the customer to blow the cut with wind, but upward or downward discharge will also form deposits on the surface.

7. Dent and corrosion

Denting and corrosion adversely affect the surface of the cut edge, affecting the appearance. They occur in cutting errors that should be avoided.

8. Heat affected zone

In laser cutting, the area along cutting is heated. At the same time, the metal structure changes. For example, some metals harden. The heat-affected zone refers to the depth of the area where changes in internal structure occur.

9. Deformation

If cutting causes the part to heat up rapidly, it will deform. This is particularly important in fine machining, where contours and webs are often only a few tenths of a millimeter wide. Controlling laser power and using short laser pulses can reduce component heating and avoid deformation.