Prediction of laser drilled hole geometries from linear cutting operation by way of artificial neural networks

This paper deals on artificial intelligence (AI) application for the estimation of kerf geometry and hole diameters for laser micro-cutting and laser micro-drilling operations. To this aim laser cutting and laser drilling operation were performed on NIMONIC 263 superalloy sheet, 0.38 mm in nominal thickness, by way of a 100 W fibre laser in modulated wave regime. Linear cuts and holes (by trepanning) were performed fixing the average power at 80 W and changing the pulse duration, the cutting speed, the focus depth and the laser path (the latter only for the drilling operations). Kerf width and the holed diameter, at the upper and downsides, were measured by digital microscopy. Different artificial neural networks (ANNs) were developed and tested to predict the kerf widths and the diameters (at the upper and downside). Two ANNs were addressed to the linear cutting process modelling; also, two further ANNs were developed for micro-drilling on the base of the linear cutting process features. The networks were trained with a subset of data containing the process conditions and the kerf/hole geometry. The ANN test was performed with the remaining data. The results show that ANNs can model the cut and hole geometry as a function of the process parameters. Moreover, the ANN trained with kerf geometry is more efficient. Therefore, a functional correlation between the kerf geometries achievable in the linear cutting process and micro-drilling was assessed.