Study on the mechanism of laser forming to the thin stainless-steel wire

Abstract

Laser forming is a non-contact machining technique for metallic materials that has mainly been used for bending thin metal sheets. Because non-contact machining does not exhibit spring-back, laser forming can be used for high-precision bending. In this study, we tried to use laser forming for fabricating small, thin wire parts. The effects of laser irradiation parameters such as pulse width, peak power, and oscillation frequency, were carefully examined. The irradiated wires were pre-processed and thereafter subjected to sectional SEM-based structural analysis. From the analysis, we confirmed that wire bending is induced by an intra-wire temperature gradient. In addition, we propose a multi-irradiation technique for enhancing the stability of bending and obtaining large bending angles. The effect of this technique was also investigated by sectional and heat conduction analyses.