Now that companies like Abbott are conducting large clini- cal trials on dissolvables, laser manufacturers are racing to keep up with the demand for ultrafast, pulsed lasers that can work on all manner of new polymers. And the laser-makers are not shy about pushing their new machines. Laserdyne’s Capp said: “They’re spending a ton of money on it, they really are. So we get beat up all the time, why aren’t you buying our pico-laser, why aren’t you buying our femtolaser?” But it’s not just about buying new machines when switch- ing from metal to polymer production. It also involves a learn- ing curve for the stent manufacturers.


“I think the main challenge is the polymers tend to melt, so they can be damaged easily,” said Herman Chui, senior director for product marketing at Spectra-Physics (Santa Clara, CA). His company was the first and is now the No. 1 producer of ultra- fast, pulsed lasers, which can solve that problem, Chui said. While longer-pulse lasers melt the material they’re fo- cused on, shorter-pulse lasers avoid that problem by driving


electrons into a plasma plume. The laser energy enters the material and departs almost instantaneously, before it can be transferred within the material as heat. As a result, machin- ing with an ultrafast, pulsed laser is often referred to as “cold machining” or “cold ablation.”


“Almost nobody wants to postprocess bioabsorbable stents, because by their very nature they’re very susceptible to their environment.”


In fact, the new approach is crucial to the emerging dissolvables industry: The polymers have such low melting points that before the newer generation of ultrafast, pico- and femtosecond pulsed lasers were available and reliable, scaled production was all but impossible.


May 2014 | ManufacturingEngineeringMedia.com 103


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