Study of the mechanism of steel cutting with the weakly focused radiation from a repetitively pulsed CO2 laser

A study was made of the process of steel plate cutting with a weakly focused radiation from a repetitively pulsed CO₂ laser with the output of no more than 500 W without the use of a gas jet. The regimes were determined in which the removal of the melt under the action of the vapour recoil momentum proved to be more efficient than the melt removal under continuous irradiation. The physical mechanism of the process was proposed and its numerical model was elaborated. A comparison with experiments showed that this model provides a qualitatively adequate description of the experimental data and that it can be employed for the evaluation of remote cutting with high-power laser radiation.