Product Code: ICAL09_605

Fiber Laser Orbital Cutting of Stainless Steel Tubes
Authors:
Tuomas Purtonen, Lappeenranta University of Technology; Lappeenranta Finland
Antti Salminen, -; -
Presented at ICALEO 2009

Fiber laser cutting of metallic materials has been studied in numerous occasions for the past few years. Most of the research done in this field has been focused on one or two-dimensional vertical cutting of sheet metals. Different industrial aspects have shown an increasing interest in laser cutting of pipes. Conventional CO2-laser laser pipe cutting machines can not fulfill the requirements set for some applications. Some applications of pipe cutting are such that vertical cutting positions can not be considered. Also in some cases the cut pipe can not be rotated for some reason. In these situations the only reasonable cutting method is orbital cutting. Previous tests have shown that high pressure fiber laser fusion cutting of medium thick sheets provides reasonable quality even in non-vertical cutting. In this paper, these results are utilized in orbital cutting tests. Cutting tests presented in this paper include vertical and non-vertical cutting of stainless steel plates, cutting of pipes in vertical and non-vertical positions, and orbital cutting of pipes. The cutting tests have been done with a 5 kW multi mode fiber laser. The cutting head is a commercial high pressure unit with a capacitive height controlling unit.