A Study on the Influence of Laser Surface Texturing Parameters on the Dimensional Accuracy of the Textured Designs

The research involves an experimental investigation into the laser surface texturing (LST) of stainless steel 316L parts to explore the correlation between the laser process parameters and the dimensional accuracy of the textured designs. A full factorial experimental design was used to analyse the impact of the input parameters via main effects plot and analysis of variance (ANOVA) test. The results indicated that laser track distance along the traverse scanning direction had the most significant effects on all the output responses, i.e. width and depth of the textured grooves and width of the riblet (unmachined region). Laser intensity also had significant effect on the riblet width and groove depth, while scanning velocity did not exhibit any statistically significant influence on any of the responses. The deviations in the riblet and groove widths from the nominal CAD design were the least when using a track distance of 10 μm, whereas the deviations in the groove depth was minimum for a track distance of 100 μm.