COMPARISON OF DIFFERENT MATERIAL CUTTING TECHNOLOGIES IN TERMS OF THEIR IMPACT ON THE CUTTING QUALITY OF STRUCTURAL STEEL

The paper deals with a comparison of the most frequently used thermal cutting technologies applied to the structural, low carbon steel EN S355J0 in engineering enterprises with a focus on experimental measurement and evaluation of characteristics of the heat affected zone. It gives a mutual comparison of these technologies in terms of the achieved heat affected zone. The goal of this paper was to use the property changes in the used material (affected by laser, plasma arc and oxygen cutting) as the quality indicator of the cutting process.