ARTICLE IN PRESS

International Journal of Machine Tools & Manufacture 49 (2009) 1152–1154

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International Journal of Machine Tools & Manufacture

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ijmactool

Short communication

Scaling laws for the laser-oxygen cutting of thick-sheet mild steel

A.G. Malikov , A.M. Orishich, V.B. Shulyatyev
Khristianovichs’ Institute of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, SB RAS, Institutskaja 4/1, 630090 Novosibirsk, Russia

a r t i c l e in f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: The laws of scaling the laser-oxygen cutting of mild steel based on experimental optimization are
Received 14 May 2009 proposed. The sheets from 5 to 25 mm are cut with the aid of CO2 laser.
Received in revised form It has been established that the minimal surface roughness is reached within the whole thickness
20 June 2009
range if the laser energy value per unit of the removed material and the power per sheet thickness unit
Accepted 22 June 2009
Available online 30 June 2009
are held constant. The results permit to determine the laser power and cutting speed values optimal for
a certain sheet thickness. Within the range of large thicknesses, the conditions of cutting with minimal
Keywords: roughness are written as ratios between dimensionless variables. Evaluation of the maximum thickness
Laser of the sheet, at which the high-quality cutting is realizable, has been made.
Cutting
& 2009 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
Thick sheet
Roughness
Optimization
Scaling

1. Introduction always possible to compare correctly the data from different

High processing speed and high edge quality are the main
features of laser cutting. The relation between optimum cutting
speed and sheet thickness is an essential characteristic of laser
cutting and as surface roughness is a critically important
parameter of laser cut surfaces, the cutting speed producing the
minimum roughness can be considered as the optimum.
In spite of many theoretical and experimental works, the laser-
oxygen cutting process is still being studied [1,2]. Multiple
physical processes are associated with surface profile forma-
tion. Among them are non-steady-state oxidation front propaga-
tion [3–5], oscillatory characteristic of the thin liquid film on the
cutting front [6], melt flow instabilities, for example [7]. No
adequate theoretical models of the laser cutting, including all
these factors, currently exist, and this lack is of special concern
regarding thick sheets. As a consequence, theoretical modeling
cannot be considered a reliable method to find out the optimum
cutting speed for minimum roughness. Some authors [for
example, 8,9] find the cutting speed from the energy balance.
The cutting speed found in such a manner should be considered as
the maximum one. However, the maximum speed does not
provide the maximum quality. At the moment, quite a large data
base on the laser cutting is available. These data, however, are
disembodied, as they often contain incomplete sets of parameters
and are obtained from different conditions. That is why it is not
 Corresponding author. Tel.:/fax: +7 383 3307342.
E-mail addresses: smalik@ngs.ru (A.G. Malikov), orishich@academ.org
(A.M. Orishich), victor0312@mail.ru (V.B. Shulyatyev).
sources to clarify common process situations. Moreover, the
quality criteria are not always clearly formulated.
To overcome these deficiencies Scaling laws for the
reactive gas laser cutting of mild steel are determined in this
work from the experimental optimization for sheet thicknesses
in the range, 5–25 mm. The following optimization criteria have
been adopted: (i) no dross has to be allowed, (ii) surface
roughness has to be the minimum.
2. Experimental procedure
In these experiments, CW CO2 gas laser equipped with a self-
filtering optical resonator SFUR with the Beam Parameter Product
equal to 4.7 mm*mrad [10] was used for cutting. The cutting was
carried out by the traditional method. The circular laser beam was
focused by a single ZnSe lens; oxygen with purity up to 99.999%
was supplied to the cutting kerf through a conical nozzle. Steel
sheets of 5, 10, 16, 20 and 25 mm were cut, using various values of
power up to the beam maximum of 4.5 kW. A series of laser power
values W was specified for every thickness. Cutting speed and
focus position were varied for every specific power value. The
values of cutting speed v and kerf width b, corresponding to the
minimum roughness, were determined. Surface roughness Rz was
measured with a laser confocal scanning microscope Olympus
LEXT. Measurements were made at two cross-sections—near the
cutting sheet top surface and near the bottom one. The maximum
value from the measured ones was accepted as a characteristic for
a particular sample. The kerf width was measured with optical

0890-6955/$ - see front matter & 2009 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

doi:10.1016/j.ijmachtools.2009.06.013
 ARTICLE IN PRESS
A.G. Malikov et al. / International Journal of Machine Tools & Manufacture 49 (2009) 1152–1154
Nomenclature
W laser power, W
v cutting speed, mm/s
b kerf width, mm
t sheet thickness, mm
Rz roughness, mm
k material heat conductivity, W/m/K
a material heat diffusivity, mm2/s
measuring microscope with the minimum value of scale
factor of 1 mm. The measurements were made on the sheet top
surface.
3. Experimental results and discussion
The results are presented in Fig. 1, dimensionless variables
W/ktT and vb/a are used, where k is heat conductivity, a is
heat diffusivity, T is melting temperature and t is thickness.
Thermophysical parameters were chosen for pure iron at the room
temperature.
As can be seen in Fig. 1, allowing for some experimental error,
all experimental data can be described by a linear dependence. As
a consequence, the value defined as E ¼ W/vtb remains constant,
and provided that kerf side walls are parallel, E represents the
laser energy per unit volume of the removed material. The solid
line in Fig. 1 is the result of approximation by the root-mean-
square method and the corresponding value of E is 19.4 J/mm3. If
the surface roughness is minimum, the dimensionless relation
between the cutting speed and laser power can be written as
W=ktT ¼ Peð1 þ Sf ÞE=gðcT þ LÞ
Expression (1) enables each Peclet number to be correlated to
the laser power value, at which the roughness will be minimum,
for a given sheet thickness. The roughness has different magni-
tudes for different couples of values (W, Pe), as is shown in Fig. 2
for t ¼ 10 mm. It is evident that the dependence Rz on W/ktT and
Pe has its minimum. There is also the minimum on the similar
dependence at t ¼ 5 mm.
Fig. 1. Dependence of dimensionless velocity vb/a (Peclet number) on the
dimensionless power W/ktT for minimum roughness.
1153
T material melting temperature, K
g material density, kg/m3
c material specific heat, J/kg/K
L material latent heat of melting, J/kg
E laser energy per volume unit of removed material, J/mm3
Es laser energy per unit of cutting surface, J/mm2
Sf Stephan number
Pe Peclet number
The limited laser power did not permit to define the presence
of minimum as the thickness was above 10 mm. Fig. 2 shows the
measured value of Rz vs the laser power and cutting speed at the
sheet thickness of 10 mm. Values W/ktT and vb/a in Fig. 2 are
related to Eq. (1).
Table 1 presents the W/t for minimal Rz at t ¼ 5, 10 mm. Table 1
also gives the values of W/t for the best samples at sheet thickness
above 10 mm. It is evident that all W/t values are closely related.
The mean value of W/t from Table 1 is 194 W/mm for the
thickness range of 5y25 mm. The corresponding dimensionless
value W/ktT ¼ is 1.6 and the corresponding value of Peclet number
is equal to 0.5 according to Eq. (1) (vb ¼ 11 mm2/s). It is known
that high-quality cutting corresponds to the confined range of Pe
[9,11]. Notice that cut-quality criteria are not always clearly
formulated. A specific value of the Peclet number was found in
this work in accordance with the unambiguous quantitative
criterion of quality.
The kerf width is not among the assigned cutting parameters,
as it is convenient to exclude the kerf width from conditions of the
ð1Þ
Fig. 2. Surface roughness Rz as a function of the dimensionless velocity and
dimensionless power at the sheet thickness 10 mm.
Table 1
Laser power per thickness unit.
t (mm) W/t (W/mm)
5 220
10 180
16 190
20 200
25 180
 ARTICLE IN PRESS
1154 A.G. Malikov et al. / International Journal of Machine Tools & Manufacture 49 (2009) 1152–1154
high-quality cut. From the practical viewpoint, it is convenient to
eliminate b from the conditions of the qualitative cutting, since
this value is not an initial parameter. Results from the experi-
ments undertaken in this work show that kerf width on the top
surface can be approximated by the expression b ¼ 0.35+0.02t.
Then, the following relation can be written for W (W), v (mm/c)
and t (mm):
W ¼ 194t
V ¼ 11=ð0:35 þ 0:02tÞ
Expressions (2) and (3) present the conditions of reactive gas
laser cutting of mild steel with minimum Rz. For thick sheets,
these conditions may be written in dimensionless form since the
first term in (3) can be ignored. Then W/ktT ¼ 1.6 and vt/a ¼ 24.
Severance energy Es can be derived from (2) and (3), where
Es ¼ W/vt [12] and therefore
Es ¼ 6:2 þ 0:35t
Severance energy data have been collected by Black [13] for the
reactive gas cutting with work-piece thickness values up to
20 mm. All data lie within the range of 6 J/mm2oEso13 J/mm2.
Black [13] suggested the mean value Es ¼ 9.5 J/mm2 as an initial
approximation regardless of sheet thickness. Assumingly the data
scatter in [13] results from the severance energy dependence on
sheet thickness. Expression (4) takes this dependence into
account. Evaluations using expression (4) give 6.6 J/mm2
oEso13.2 J/mm2 for 1 mmoto20 mm, giving an average value
of 9.9 J/mm2. Hence, expression (4) successfully describes the data
presented in [13].
The ratio, expression (3), enables evaluation of the limiting
sheet thickness at which the high-quality cutting is obtainable. It
is known that when cutting speed is too small, roughness
increases because of material overheating and uncontrolled side
burning. If 8 mm/s is taken as the lowest critical value [14], then,
according to (3), the high-quality cutting is realizable on the
sheets of no more than 50 mm thick.
4. Conclusions
The conclusion derived from the present work can be
formulated as follows. Surface roughness dependence on the
cutting parameters has been investigated experimentally for the
laser-oxygen cutting of mild steel with sheet thickness from 5 to
25 mm. Two conditions for minimum surface roughness have
been established: (i) the laser energy per unit material volume
removed should be constant; (ii) the laser power per unit
thickness of cut sheet should be constant. The optimum values
of these two parameters have been determined. The above
conditions result in a constant Peclet number. The kerf width
ð2Þ
and sheet thickness ratio have been determined experimentally.
ð3Þ The conditions of minimum roughness as relations between
cutting speed, laser power, and sheet thickness have been
proposed. These relations take the dimensionless form within
the large thicknesses. The maximum sheet thickness, at which the
low-roughness cutting surface is achievable, has been evaluated.
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