Experimental study on negative laser bending process of steel foils

In this paper, laser bending experiments were carried out on the stainless foil for producing negative bending angles. BM-dominated laser parameters, such as larger ratio of beam diameter to specimen thickness and lower scanning speed, help to produce negative bending angles. However, the bending direction in BM-dominated process will be uncertain due to the influence of the specimen's initial stress state and surface conditions. For this reason, experiments on stainless foil loaded with controlled pre-stresses were carried out for producing certain negative bending angles. The effect of the pre-stress and laser parameters are investigated experimentally. The experimental results show that negative bending angles could be produced conveniently when the pre-stresses were induced by elastic pre-bending which direction away from the laser beam, and the angles increase remarkably with the pre-stresses increasing. A set of reasonable laser parameters (laser power, scanning speed and beam diameter) for good quality negative bending angles forming were gotten by analyzing the effect of each parameter respectively in the experiments.