Abstract
Laser forming is a new flexible forming technique that form sheet metal by stress induced by external heat instead of external force. Laser forming could open up the sheet forming industry to the advantages of rapid prototyping and low lead time manufacturing, and allow prototypes or pre-production numbers of components to be produced before researchers and practitioners committing expenditure to tooling.The ultimate goal of this research is threefold: (1) establish analytical thermal model and study the effects of laser forming parameters on temperature distribution; (2) establish analytical mechanical model to predict the bending angle and to identify the relationships between the bending angle and forming parameters; (3) establish transient thermal-structure analysis by the FEM to predict the final shape of the workpiece for non-straight laser path and to identify the relationships between the final shape of the workpiece and forming parameters. The relationships will be useful for optimizing forming parameters.In order to verify the established analytical model and the FEM model, a series of experiments over a range of laser forming conditions were conducted. Results show that (1) the proposed model is more accurate than analytical models proposed by other researchers in predicting angles; (2) for complex laser paths, the displacements of workpiece estimated by the FEM were always larger than that from experiments; (3) the proposed analytical model compared with the FEM model for straight paths, bending angles estimated by the FEM were always larger than those estimated by the proposed analytical model. This was mainly because the effect of the length of workpiece was neglected for the analytical model.