Nd:YAG laser cutting of advanced ceramics

摘要

The manufacturing of elements made of advanced ceramics is done traditionally by the use of diamond coated tools. The inherent properties of those materials such as very high hardness and brittleness, made machining a very hard work; being noisy, powdery and unsafe for the worker. Thus, there is a need to introduce new processing methods in order to improve the working conditions and also the quality of the products. In this paper we present the results of the work carried out to investigate the possibilities of an optical fiber guided Nd:YAG laser to cut mullite-alumina plates. We used a 500 W pulsed Nd:YAG laser to perform different experiments in which the influence of the average laser power and the assist gas pressure on the maximum cutting speed was studied.