Finite Element Analysis on Pulsed Laser Forming of Sheet Metal

Pulsed laser forming is a non-contact thermal forming process, where sheet metal gets plastically deformed by thermal residual stresses induced by controlled discontinuous laser irradiations. The aim of this paper is to determine the temperature and deformation fields using finite element analysis under different processing conditions. Two types of pulsed laser forming processes, i.e., overlapped and discrete spot forming have been identified depending on the combinations of process parameters. Bending angle is found to increase with the degree of overlap and decrease with the increase of gap in case of the two types of spot forming processes. A comparative study between pulsed and continuous laser forming hasalso been performed using both finite element simulation and experiments.Bending angle in case of discrete spot pulsed laser forming is found to be more compared to the continuous laser forming. The results of finite element simulations have been found to be in good agreement with the experimental results.