With the increasingly fierce competition in the laser processing industry, how to improve efficiency and save costs has become a consideration for most users. Optical fiber laser cutting machine quickly becomes the mainstream because of its advantages of fast cutting speed, small material deformation and high processing accuracy. In particular, the application of high-power laser greatly improves the efficiency of laser processing.

The figure above shows the comparison of nitrogen cutting speed of different power fiber laser cutting machines corresponding to stainless steel, which shows that for stainless steel cutting, the higher the laser power, the faster the cutting speed.

The common cutting auxiliary gases of optical fiber laser cutting machine are O2, N2 and air. As the cost of O2 and N2 is higher than that of compressed air, the use of compressed air as auxiliary gas can greatly reduce the treatment cost.

O2 is mainly used to cut carbon steel. Its principle is that the oxidation reaction of oxygen and metal gives off a lot of heat, and at the same time, a certain air flow will blow out oxides and slag from the reaction area, thus forming a notch in the metal. And because a lot of heat is generated due to oxidation reaction in the cutting process, so high power is not required.

N2 is mainly used to cut stainless steel, aluminum plate and steel plate of certain thickness at the same time. The higher the power, the greater the cutting thickness of carbon steel plate. It relies on laser energy to melt metals and blow away melted materials with high pressure to ensure that unreasonable chemical reactions will not occur during the cutting process. In stainless steel and aluminum cutting, we can obtain brighter section effect and better acute angle effect.

Air itself exists in the atmosphere. It is compressed into an air receiver by an air compressor and then filtered, cooled and dried to remove water and oil from the air. The cutting principle of air is the same as that of N2. It can also make up for the shortage of O2, because the content of O2 in air is about 20%.

Let's take the 8KW optical fiber laser cutting machine as an example to compare the cutting effects of various auxiliary gases between stainless steel and carbon steel.

From top to bottom: 12mm nitrogen cutting stainless steel section, 12mm air cutting stainless steel section, 12mm air cutting polished stainless steel section. Compared with nitrogen cutting, the section of air cutting is a little black without slag, and it can reach brightness after polishing.

How can optical fiber laser cutting machine save costs?

In terms of speed, air cutting stainless steel is slightly faster than nitrogen cutting, but the advantages are not obvious.

The picture shows the effect of air cutting 8mm carbon steel and 10mm carbon steel. It can be seen that there is a small amount of slag hanging on the 8mm carbon steel, while the slag hanging on the 10mm carbon steel is relatively serious. Therefore, it is not recommended to conduct air cutting for carbon steel plates above 10mm. At the same time, due to the different source and quality of carbon steel, the cutting effect will be very different.

As for cutting speed, air has no advantage over nitrogen, but these two gases are always ahead of oxygen when the thickness is less than or equal to 8mm. In addition, the brightness and cleanliness of carbon steel oxygen cutting section are much better than those of air and nitrogen.

To sum up, under relatively loose conditions, gas cutting has a great cost advantage. However, please note that when selecting the air cutting method, we need to ensure that the air passes through the filter and regularly maintain the air compressor and dryer. If the air entering the cutting head contains water and oil, it will cause fog of the protective mirror in a short time and affect the cutting quality. If the protective mirror is not replaced in time, the temperature inside the cutting head may rise under the irradiation of high-power beam, which may damage the internal mirror set.

For factories with large processing capacity, supporting high-power fiber cutting machine is the best choice to bring high cutting efficiency and low cost, and its income is higher than the cost of secondary processing. However, it is difficult to reduce the cost of air cutting for small mills. Therefore, it is necessary to select the appropriate gas cutting method according to the processing capacity