Search

Conventional polishing of components is a time- and labor-intensive process. Moreover, manual polishing mostly depends on the processor's abilities. In accordance with these and additional difficulties, there is a strong need for automatable and efficient variants. For this purpose, polishing by means of laser beam, which enables a contact free and automatable processing of surfaces, provides a promising alternative. This paper investigates the laser polishing of the aluminum alloy AlSi9MnMg. Aluminum poses a particular challenge for laser polishing, due to high level of reflection, high thermal conductivity, and high coefficient of thermal expansion. For the investigations, a disk laser with a maximum power of 4000 W was used. The processing took place with pulsed wave laser beam at a pulse frequency of 1000 Hz and a minimal pulse duration of 0.3 ms as well as a continuous wave laser beam. The beam guidance was done by 1D-scanner optics in a highly pure inert gas atmosphere. The samples were first genera...