Process Planning in Laser Milling

The present work defines a strategy to perform an automatic setup procedure for a laser milling manufacturing process. The manufacturing system is constituted by a milling CNC machine structure coupled with a DPSS Nd:YAG Laser source. This work shows the criteria developed to evaluate the influence of process parameters on material removal rate when processing mild steels and aluminium alloys. The method, based on a statistical approach, was performed by experiments executed using DOE techniques and developing a regression model validated by a ANOVA Analysis. It can be easily applied to other materials and it represents an useful tool to asses the right process parameters in roughing and in finishing operations. A basic manual approach is presented and the automatic procedure developed is in detail explained. The implemented Software System automatically generates a part program to laser milling a set of pockets, using different laser parameters, then permit to scan them by an optical sensor and to calculate the empirical coefficients to use in the regression model that provide the material removal rate.