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D. Schuöcker, A. Kratky, R. Bielak, M. Dolibasic, F. Klaas:
"Recent Progress and New Applications of Laser Assisted Metal Forming";
Talk: 5th Int. Conference "Beam Technolgies and Laser Application", St. Petersburg, Russia; 2006-09-23 - 2006-09-27.

During plastic deformation of brittle materials, for instance in bending of titanium sheets, the local strain can exceed the ductility - the strain at rupture - and thus cracks appear that eventually lead to rupture. Hot working would be beneficial since a temperature of a few hundred centigrade leads to an increase of the ductility by more than 100%. Since during bending the deformations take place in a narrow zone around the bending edge, selective heating for instance with a laser would be sufficient to avoid cracks. The latter concept of laser assisted bending has reached a certain stage of maturity and recently also gave rise to the development of new processes as "laser assisted inline profiling" and "laser assisted hydroforming", where in the last case selective heating is used to compensate the effect of work hardening during preceding forming steps, that reduces the ductility to values comparable to brittle materials as mentioned above and makes thus further forming steps unfeasible.
The bulk of the actual paper work is devoted to recent progress in bending and studies of the new processes mentioned above.