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£10 million laser delivered to Prague laser facility
The UK’s Central Laser Facility has delivered £10 million worth of laser equipment to the HiLase centre in Prague for the most advanced high power laser of its kind. The new laser technology for
HiLase, a project in the Czech Republic tagged ‘new lasers for industry and research’, will benefit industry and science in areas ranging from welding to testing the resistance of optical materials. The setup will ensure a laser capability significantly more powerful, efficient, and stable than current systems across Europe. The system, developed by scientists from the Centre for Advanced Laser Technology and Applications (CALTA), was a 100J DPSS laser system offering both high energy and high repetition rates. Until now, there have either been high energy lasers, which are limited to the order of pulses per hour, or systems that produce many pulses per second, but only at relatively low energy levels. The combination of the two paves the way for a broad field of new applications.
The laser system is said to be so complex that it has taken CALTA six weeks just to decommission and deliver to Prague.
‘The deliveries included seven optical tables totalling 18 metres in length and weighing 1.4 tonnes each. The overall system weighs 20 tonnes,’ said STFC’s John Hill. ‘Overall, two HGVs and three specialist RAL transports were used to move the system. The decommissioning and transport programme was extremely challenging.’ John Collier, director of CLF, added: ‘Being able to combine high energy and high repetition rates is a major step forward, Now proven at this current 100J energy level, it has the potential to be scaled to even higher energies, opening up a whole new realm of possibilities.
Fraunhofer develops a laser process simulation mobile app
S
cientists from Fraunhofer ILT have developed the first-ever laser process simulation software that calculates processes in real time and also runs on tablet computers and smartphones. The new software allows users to simulate processes without the need for expensive and complex experiments and to find optimum process parameters even more effectively. Today, software is able to simulate a wide variety of laser processes with a good degree of reliability to predict what will happen on the workpiece. However, these processes require expert knowledge as well as hours of computing time; this makes it unsuitable for factory workers, who tend to rely on the system providers’ technology tables when setting up new processes. The simulation experts at the Fraunhofer
ILT have developed new software that requires much less in the way of resources, so that it can even run on tablet computers and smartphones.
This is made possible by simplifying the computing models depending on the specific laser process being carried out; because these simplifications dramatically reduce the complexity of calculations, they can produce a result much more quickly. Conventional simulation programs deliver a complex representation of the processes involved in the interaction of laser beam and material. For the process of laser drilling, for example, users are typically interested in factors like how the conicity of a drill hole changes when parameters such as focal position or spot diameter are adjusted. The simplified simulation allows the influence of such parameters to be properly investigated, and the results match up with experimental data very well. In contrast to earlier methods and to regular experiments, now the effects of changed parameters are
10 ELECTRO OPTICS l FEBRUARY 2016
Reduced drilling simulation with beam distribution. The red line shows the good correspondence with the experimental result
displayed immediately. In addition, changing individual parameters can be easily done by ordinary factory works, and the results appear instantaneously in the adjacent window. This means that the simulation can be carried out directly at the laser machine on portable devices, as opposed to having to leave the factory floor to obtain results. According to Fraunhofer, the software has been designed primarily for system developers as well as machine operators. However, the simplification of computing models could also benefit completely new applications. In the automotive sector, for example, the simulation of crash tests still uses up considerable computing capacity, and so transferring the principle of reduced models promises substantial savings.
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Fraunhofer ILT
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