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Laser Technology


industrial R&D stage. “Companies are looking at it because the picosecond laser offers high quality and fine dimensions that are not attainable with other lasers, but they have really become industrial tools rather than lab devices over the last three or four years.


“One of the considerations with the picosecond lasers is that they are certinaly not cheap, with a system costing you around half-a-million dollars. However, the $64,000 question is does the laser offer such a unique process that the product improvement can justify this level of investment?” Fiber lasers are the focus for Miyachi Unitek cutting systems,


which typically use a 100 or 200-W single-mode fiber laser for medical cutting applications, Shannon says, noting that the lasers offer the ability to cut parts with diameters of about 0.050" to 0.25" (0.13–6 mm) with wall thicknesses of about 0.003 to 0.020" (0.076–0.51 mm). “This represents quite a broad range of cutting capability, and there’s a lot of different features that you can do with lasers,” he says, “such as the single-sided slots,


windows, on axes and off-axes features and spirals for many flexible shaft, hypotube, and cannula applications. “Traditionally the medical industry has used a lot of EDM


technology, both wire EDM and sinker EDM, and while wire EDM is still quite prevalent, sinker EDM is normally used for single-sided features,” he adds, “and it is much, much slower than laser cutting—significantly slower than laser cutting.” With wire EDM, medical manufacturers can cut out teeth on arthroscopic tools for knee surgery, he says. “If you have symmetric teeth on both sides of the tube, wire EDM is great, because it’s like a cheese cutter, and you can rack up 10 or 15 of these parts and you can cut more than one at once. So the advantage with wire EDM is, in some instances, you can gang up multiple parts, so although the cutting speed is slow, you’re cutting 15 parts in one go.”


Lasers can do the same thing, but only on one part at a time, and it offers features that you can’t attain with an EDM process, Shannon says. “It offers the capability to give you


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76 www.sme.org/manufacturingengineering | May 2012


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