A Study on the Influence of Laser Parameters on Laser-Assisted Machining of AISI H-13 Steel

The machinability of a steel workpiece through conventional and Laser-Assisted Machining (LAM) is studied by the help of the Finite Element Method (FEM). In LAM, the laser beam is applied as a heat source to ensure sufficient local heating of the workpiece at a certain distance from the cutting tool and the machinability of materials is increased since the values of the cutting forces are decreased. A thermostructural FEM model is developed to simulate the conventional and the LAM orthogonal cutting of AISI H-13 steel. The Johnson-Cook material model that takes into account the effect of plastic strain, strain rate and temperature, along with a fracture model, is used in the simulations. For varying feed rate, parametric simulations are carried out, for different test cases of the laser beam diameter and the laser heat flux. Key engineering parameters, like cutting forces, temperature distributions, Von Mises stresses and plastic strains, are compared for both cutting processes. This comparison leads to important notifications on the influence of the cutting and laser parameters to LAM. The obtained results indicate that LAM may improve the machinability of AISI H-13 steel by reducing the cutting forces to a maximum percentage of ~15%.