TECHNOLOGY NEWS
For the latest technology news from the photonics industry go to
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UK photonics to benefit from £10 million government R&D funding
The Technology Strategy Board (TSB) is to invest up to £10 million in research and development projects that stimulate innovation across the key enabling technology areas of advanced materials, biosciences, electronics, sensors and photonics, and information and communications technology. The organisation has been
running a competition to decide which projects to fund. Additional funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) may be available for projects in line with the scope of this competition. Suitable projects would contain a significant, high- quality academic research component, and would demonstrate added value by building on, or being complementary to, their existing research programmes and portfolios.
The TSB is seeking projects that advance the development of a recent discovery or breakthrough in the context of significant and identifiable technological risk, which can be broadly applied across a wide range of market opportunities and needs. Projects also need to be collaborative and business-led.
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High-brilliance diode lasers for industrial applications: BRIDLE
A consortium from five European countries has launched a research project to achieve improvements in high-power direct diode laser systems.
BRIDLE makes use of a modular, scalable and compatible approach, employing advanced technologies and beam combination architectures, delivering a diode laser source that produces more than 2kW output power from a Ø100µm, NA<0.15 optical fibre with a power-conversion efficiency of more than 40 per cent. Novel diode laser mini-bars will be developed by the consortium, targeting a brilliance three times higher than commercially available broad area emitters. Dense and coarse spectral multiplexing schemes will be investigated for power scaling. In addition, coherent beam combining techniques that phase-couple bars to produce nearly diffraction-limited output will also be investigated. During the project, a sequence of demonstrators
will be developed, each targeting a specific industrial application. Manufacturability and cost down-scaling issues are also addressed by integrating micro-optical beam shaping and beam combination into the production process. The project, which started in September and
runs for three years, will get €3 million from the European Commission’s information and communication technologies programme. Coordinated by Dilas in Germany, the consortium includes researchers from: the University of Nottingham; the Fraunhofer Institute for Laser Technology ILT and the Ferdinand Braun Institute FBH in Germany; the Laboratoire Charles Fabry of the Institut d’Optique at CNRS, France; and the industrial partners Modulight, of Finland, and Bystronic, from Switzerland. Interested parties may ask to be put on a mailing list to receive the project e-newsletter every nine months.
European HALO project aiming to ring in the manufacturing changes
Work has started on a project to develop and apply research into laser technology, in an effort to improve manufacturing capabilities and efficiencies. The high power adaptable laser beams for materials processing technology transfer project, or HALO, was inaugurated in September and is funded as part of the European Union (EU) framework seven (FP7) programme. It will be led by Gooch and Housego, with
ELECTRO OPTICS l FEBRUARY 2013
other participants including Fraunhofer, Trumpf, Laser Expertise and the University of Southampton.
The project aims to give the European manufacturing sector a more effective materials- processing capability, in order to be globally competitive. Accordingly, the HALO project will look at how both CW and pulsed laser systems can improve efficiencies in welding, cutting sheet metal and glass,
with thickness ranging from <1mm to 25mm. HALO aims to put in place the necessary elements to enable significant advances in lasers for material processing. The EU’s FP7 is a funding initiative from the European Commission, with the overall aim of developing technologies and their applications. The overriding goal is to improve the sustainability of manufacturing in Europe.
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