A novel and comprehensive method for laser forming of cylindrical surfaces with arbitrary radius of curvature

Laser forming is a flexible forming process that needs no hard tooling or external forces. In this paper, laser forming of cylindrical surfaces with arbitrary radius of curvature is investigated analytically and experimentally. As the laser forming process is a die-less forming process, production of a desired shape from initial blank is very difficult with this process. Because in the laser forming process, there are some variable parameters such as laser power, laser beam diameter, laser scanning speed and dimensions of initial blank that directly affect the final shape of the produced part. Also, in addition to above mentioned parameters, in the laser forming process of a cylindrical surface, a new parameter says number of irradiating lines is added to variable parameters. Therefore complexity of laser forming of a cylindrical surface will be more than a simple laser bending. In this paper, an analytical method for laser forming of cylindrical surfaces with arbitrary radius of curvature is proposed. In the proposed method, with the aim of technical limitations of laser machine such as laser power, laser beam diameter and laser scanning speed, the number of irradiating lines and the distance between neighbor lines are proposed for production cylindrical surfaces with arbitrary radius of curvature. Also, using experimental tests the performance and accuracy of the proposed method are investigated and verified. Analytical and experimental results show that with the proposed analytical method, cylindrical surfaces with any arbitrary radius of curvature can be produced with a very good accuracy.