PROCESS PLANNING FOR HIGH-SPEED COIL-FED LASER CUTTING WITH TWO LASER HEADS

Abstract

Coil-fed laser cutting is widely used for mass production in various industries. Using metal coils instead of metal sheets can not only streamline the feeding of the stock material into the workspace of laser cutting machines but also allow enlarging the size of the coil fed to the laser cutting machine to a virtually unlimited dimension. Practically, this is achieved by implementing machine designs that can either cut extremely long parts or have multiple laser cutting heads operating simultaneously. In the case of machine designs, in which laser heads operate on the full width of the coil, one laser head is positioned after another. It can, therefore, cut away material beforehand. This creates significant challenges for proper process planning. Cutting patterns must be laid out on the moving coil such that there is enough time for the laser heads to process part contours while they pass through the workspaces of the laser heads. In this paper, a high-speed, high-dynamic laser cutting machine with two laser heads is considered. The workflow presented in this paper automates and integrates the process planning steps—from nesting to balanced, dynamics-aware toolpath generation—into a single, optimized digital process planning toolchain, eliminating the need for manual partitioning and sequencing and enabling the optimization of the machine throughput.