Laser Assisted Bending for Efficient Light-weight-production

Currently hot-bending of sheet metals is generally avoided. If absolutely necessary, oven-heating is usually used, with the disadvantage of unacceptable heating and cooling times, big energy input, handling problems, and change of material parameters. Inductive heating is better but it still has the problem of a large heated area and the fact that for thin sheet metals high frequencies are needed for high coupling. With laser assisted bending the heat input can be concentrated on the forming zone. This was first demonstrated by Schuöcker et al. [1] with a scanned CO Laser for 1 m bending line. Here still problems with efficiency, beam guidance, and absorption were encountered and, even more important, the heating happened outside the bending tool causing again handling problems. Better suited for this task are diode lasers, with much 2