Four laser scanning schemes for tube bending, including point-source circumferential scanning, pulsed line-source axial procession, line-source axial scanning without and with water cooling are investigated in numerical simulation. The coupled thermo-mechanical model established using the finite element method is validated and applied to predict the bending deformation and help better understand bending mechanisms under different schemes. The influence of important parameters such as beam coverage, scanning velocity and cooling offset on the deformation is investigated in detail. Parametric studies are carried out to determine proper processing windows at which the largest bending can be obtained. The deformation characteristics, including the wall thickness variation and the cross-section distortion produced by different scanning schemes are analysed, along with the processing efficiency.

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2004
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