Now the use of high hardness materials is more and more common in industrial fields like aerospace or biomedical. Laser assisted machining is an innovative process for material shaping and finishing. This technique meets the needs of flexibility, speed and costs as regards the machining of these materials.

Principle :

When a material is heated (metal, ceramics) beyond a certain threshold (depending of its composition), its plasticity threshold decreases as well as its hardness. Laser assisted machining is based on this principle. Actually a material is machined with a traditional tool machine but with a located laser preheating before the cutting tool.