Laser cutting of leather :
CO2 laser cutting and engraving machines are widely used to cut or engrave the leather materials, mostly in shoes, bags, cloth or other industries. Generally, the cutting speed can reach 5–30 mm per second, the engraving speed may reach 600 mm per second (Anon., 2015).The economy of the laser cutting process mainly depends on two productivity aspects: nesting and cutting sequence. Nesting is a process of positioning of parts to be cut on given material with the main aim to minimize waste. Nesting
is often done based on operator experience and it becomes a challenge in case of large production volumes. Besides that, it does not guarantee the most efficient utilization of material. Nesting software is used nowadays to enhance material utilization and improve flexibility. Cutting sequence targets the optimal cutting procedure for minimum cycle time. The objective of cutting sequence is to find the shortest path to accomplish cutting procedure (Umar Sherif et al., 2014). The challenges with nesting and cutting sequence occur in leather cutting due to irregular shapes, contour and quality zones of natural leather. Such problems are especially common in automotive industry for instance in
cutting of large pieces of car seats (Alves et al., 2012). The role of nesting software increases when leather cutting is applied in industrial scale (Elamvazuthi et al., 2009).
Lasers are also reported to be applied for cleaning of leather surface. Nd:YAG lasers with wavelength of 1064, 532 and 266 nm were applied for this purpose. Laser irradiation was applied to historical leather artefacts in order to remove pollution substances and recover original leather color (Batishche et al, 2007, Simileanu et al., 2009).
Advantages of laser cutting
One of the main advantages of laser cutting is production at standard quality. Laser cutting also maintains production in shorter time with higher quality. Due to ability to apply CAD/CAM and CIM system in design, it is possible to manufacture absolutely identical designs (Ondogan et al., 2005).
Moreover, problems associated with conventional technologies, such as worn out design markers and dies, storage space and destruction of out–of–date ones are eliminated when laser cutting technology is used. Thus, laser cutting system provides a positive contribution to the environment from this particular point of view as well (Ondogan et al., 2005).