Investigations on the process strategy of laser remote cutting of carbon fiber reinforced plastics with a thickness of more than 5 MM

Laser cutting of CFRP becomes an issue since production volumes of CFRP-parts in automotive and aerospace industry are increasing. This paper deals with the process strategy of the remote cutting approach and its adaptively to laminates with a thickness greater than 5 mm. The strategy is varied in 3 different approaches in order to maximize the cutting depth while keeping the heat affected zone at minimum. The experiments have shown that the cutting depth is a linear function to the number of passes up to a certain depth, dependent on process speed and laser power. When changing the strategy to parallel passes, to avoid shadowing the laser beam as well as retracing the focus, the cutting depth can be increased up to 13 mm while the HAZ stays around 200 µm