Laser forming as a springback-free and noncontact forming technique has been under active investigation over the last decade. Previous investigations are mainly focused on forming of large and thick workpieces using high power lasers, with less work on precision, micro-scale bending of small and thin sheets. In this work, a 4 W continuous wave argon ion laser is used as the energy source, and t...

A short cavity Er(3+)-doped distributed-Bragg-reflector (DBR) fiber laser with a low polarization beat frequency has been demonstrated for bending measurement. The polarization beat frequency of the DBR laser is extremely sensitive to bending and can measure curvature changes as small as 1.8 x 10(-2) m(-1). Excellent agreement between experimental and theoretical results was obtained for bendin...

Laser bending of tubes is a process in which laser-induced thermal distortion is used to bend tubes without hard tooling or external forces. Mechanisms of the process are examined to better understand the deformation characteristics such as wall thickness variation, cross-section ovalization, bending radius, and asymmetry. Factors important to these characteristics are experimentally and numeri...

Recent developments in the study of the laser bending process are reviewed and presented to obtain new perspectives along the lines of dimensional characteristics and mechanical properties of the formed parts. Both numerical and experimental results are described and compared. The dimensional characteristics examined include bending angle variation and bending edge curving. The mechanical prope...

Integration of new surgical devices with surgery assisting robots is required by surgeons. We have developed a novel robotic laser coagulator with a charge coupled device (CCD) video endoscope and a bending joint. The endoscope visualizes the detail of the target, and bending joint realizes the irradiation in a selected direction. We adopted two laser diodes for this purpose: an infrared semico...

A new type of optical switching device is developed. For a semiconductor laser amplifier with a shallow-etched bending ridge waveguide, the laser beam could propagate along the bending direction or the straight direction. Switching between the two directions is characterized. With the device fabricated on the substrate with two quantum wells of different widths, switching characteristics are fo...

In this review, a number of recent developments of laser forming are presented based on the work in Manufacturing Research Laboratory (MRL) of Columbia University. In order to advance laser forming to realistic forming application, it is necessary to consider non-straightening and larger scale 3D laser forming, so that anisotropy and size effect need to be investigated in detail. In this paper,...