overview
The system can cut up to 20-mm mild steel, 12-mm stainless and aluminum and 6-mm brass and copper, the company said. To help develop and promote fiber lasers for industrial welding, SPI Lasers in the UK joined The Welding Institute in January. “One aspect of the relationship will center on the development of SPI’s novel [nanosecond (ns)] pulsed welding process that TWI will evaluate and add to its port- folio of joining processes,” according to SPI. In the disk laser realm, leading producer Trumpf con- tinues to release new systems in its flagship TruDisk line. “The beam quality can be as high as [that of] a fiber laser, but most applications cannot take advantage of this,” said Tracey Ryba, product manager for OEM lasers for North America. “The TruDisk is optimized around … cutting, welding, cladding [and] heat treating.” TruDisk sales have dramatically increased in the past
three years, with expected sales this year near 2700 units of 1-kW or higher power, Ryba said, and there are already about 7000 in the field. “About 60% of current sales are doing cutting [and] 40% are doing other applications.” Many of those applications are automotive: welding seats, instrument panels and body panels of varying thicknesses; cutting A and B pillars and hydroformed undercarriage support tubes; drilling holes in fuel injectors. Other appli- cations range from farm equipment to submersible pumps and pacemakers.
For Nogee, key trends to watch include: t Excimer lasers continuing to be vital for producing
flat-panel displays and very precise, small holes thanks to their deep ultraviolet range. “Apple is going to release an OLED phone [the iPhone 8] and bought a huge number of excimer lasers from Coherent.”
t “Very strong” UV lasers coming from IPG and Co- herent; “in five years they may replace many ex- cimer laser applications.”
t Marking lasers continuing to get cheaper, as well as cheaper diodes driving down fiber laser prices.
t High-power lasers produced by China. t The continued emergence of direct diode lasers for materials processing.
t Pico- and femtosecond (ps and fs) lasers around $100,000.
In fact, IPG this year launched its YLPP-R Series of 10– 20 ps ytterbium fiber lasers (30, 50 and 100 W) for preci- sion material micromachining, as well as the YLPF-10-500- 10-R ytterbium 500 fs fiber laser (10 W). The latter device offers less than one-minute startup time from its “warm” state, decreasing downtime for batch-to-batch process- ing, said Yuri Erokhin, vice president of strategic market- ing. A small laser head offers flexible system design and simplified beam delivery, he said. “Ultrafast fiber laser systems are an optimum tool to ful-
Á IPG’s newest industrial grade ultrafast fiber laser with rack-mountable chassis and an optical head for up to 100 W average output power.
LF6
AdvancedManufacturing.org
fill the requirements for an industrial application of glass and sapphire cutting,” IPG explained in a recent conference paper. “Our highly scal- able architecture with respect to average power and pulse energy permits the user to optimize the machining speed and the cut quality of these materials. We have shown up to 150 μJ pulse energy per pulse and up to 143 W output power in a com- pact, efficient fiber laser system generat- ing less than 20 ps pulses. Further scaling of average power up to 250 W is possible in a similar configuration.” But “there’s no sense going to short- er pulses than femtosecond,” said Ron Schaeffer, CEO of custom fabricator Pho- toMachining. “That’s not an industrially reliable thing to do because the broad- band optics get extremely complicated, and there’s really no quality payback. The
Photo courtesy IPG
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