Process information transferring for cutting paths in laser manufacturing

In laser manufacturing, the cutting parameters, such as laser power, cutting speed, assist gas pressure, and stand off distance, have a great influence on the quality of the machined parts. To ensure the quality of the machined part, the process information (cutting parameters) needs to be manually assigned and adjusted according to the different geometry characters of the part edges, like arc and line segment. The part contours are then used for generating the laser cutting paths, leaving the process information behind. Quickly and accurately transferring the process information to the corresponding cutting paths is not an easy task. In this paper, an algorithm is proposed for this task. The proposed algorithm passes information by the points in the cutting paths. First, all part edges containing process information are offset to generate closed contours. Then, whether the points in the cutting paths are included in the closed contours are judged and marked. Finally, the information as NC codes through the adjacent points in the cutting paths is outputted. To simplify the computation work, a fast approach is also proposed to determine whether the point cloud is contained in a closed contour. The feasibility and computational efficiency of the proposed algorithms are verified by examples, and the actual cutting comparison verifies the superiority of the proposed algorithm by cutting details of machined parts.