Determination of optimal laser power according to the tool path inclination angle of a titanium alloy workpiece in laser-assisted machining.

The purpose of this work was to study laser-assisted machining (LAM) according to the tool path inclination angle of a titanium alloy workpiece. Previous studies have investigated using LAM for the linear machining of difficult-to-cut materials. However, during the linear machining of an inclined planar workpiece, the laser spot is deformed into an elliptical shape, and then, the tool follows the long major axis of the elliptical laser spot. For tool path inclination angle machining, the tool follows the arbitrarily oriented direction of the elliptical laser spot. Thus, determining the preheating temperature of the workpiece by tool path inclination angle processing is different from that of linear processing. In this work, a study was carried out to optimize the preheating and machining based on the tool path inclination angle. The optimal laser power according to tool path inclination angle was determined through thermal analysis, and the thermal analysis results were compared with the results from preheating experiments. Also, machining experiments were conducted using the as-determined laser power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]