Modeling and reducing edge effects in laser bending

Laser forming of sheet metal offers the advantages of requiring no hard tooling, no spring back and no external force, thus this technology reduces cost, increases flexibility and accuracy. Laser forming is a complicated and transient thermo-mechanical process involving elastic and plastic strain depended on time history. How to control and enhance the accuracy of the laser forming attracts much attention. This paper delivered a deep insight into the mechanism of the edge effects in laser forming, improved an existing analytical model to approximately predict the edge effects, and based on this model a new strategy was put forward to reduce the edge effects. Numerical simulations and experiments were carried out to validate the model and the presented strategy.