Thermal and Mechanical Analysis for Laser Bending of Thin Brittle Substrate

A computer-aided-engineering technique, using finite element method (FEM), was developed in modeling the process of laser bending of thin brittle substrate. A fiber laser of continuous wave was employed in experiment to irradiate a thin glass substrate to validate the thermal modeling results. All temperature variations at selected locations calculated by the FEM model agreed well with the experiments. For mechanical modeling of laser bending of thin glass substrate, trends of results in both simulation and experiment were consistent. Given a laser scanning strategy which preheated the edges and then scanned within the specimen width, stress at the edge point remained low throughout the entire laser bending process. In this way, the glass substrate was successfully bent by laser processing.