Metal laser cutting belongs to mature laser material processing technologies in\nindustry applications. However, without understanding of the mechanism\nunderlying the overall process, the improvement of the cutting quality is restricted.\nIn this paper, an instantaneous melt removal model is presented to\ndescribe the process of material removal and striation formation. In the temperature\nfield calculation, melted metal layer is removed when it grows to an\nassumed thickness. The effects of cutting parameters including cutting speed,\ngas pressure and laser power on the shape of striation are discussed. A novel\nmethod of getting striation free cutting surface is presented. Finally, laser cutting\nexperiments of mild steel is conducted to validate the model. The striation\nvariation trend can be well predicted by the model presented here and the\ndisagreement may be caused by the coupling effect of cutting speed and critical\nthickness value.
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