The cutting process and damage mechanism of large thickness CFRP based on water jet guided laser processing

Abstract Carbon fiber-reinforced polymer composites (CFRP) is a composite material with resin as matrix and carbon fiber as reinforcement. It has been widely used in aerospace, military products, and automotive industries. However, CFRP is prone to damage because of its complex anisotropy and low interlayer strength, so it is a typical difficult-to-process material. Water jet guided laser processing technology is a combination of laser and water jet processing technology, which has the characteristics of no wear, no contact, flexible processing, and potential advantages of reducing HAZ and increasing cutting depth. In this paper, the water jet guided laser processing technology is used to perform cutting experiment for CFRP processing of low damage and large depth. In the experiment, the influencing law of the process parameters such as laser power, CFRP feed speed and water jet speed on the cutting results is obtained; then the cutting thickness of 1 mm, 2 mm, 4 mm and 10 mm CFRP is realized by adopting the parallel path layered scanning method. Moreover, the influences of carbon fiber arrangement direction and laser cutting path on the CFRP cutting damage mechanism are analyzed for the first time, and three damage mechanisms (exposing, falling-off and pulling-out) are summarized, which will provide the reference for the high precision cutting of large thickness CFRP.