Laser cutting technology’s advantages play to medical manufacturing’s require- ments for high cut quality in a noncontact, highly flexible process, notes Geoff Shan- non, laser technology man- ager, Miyachi Unitek Corp. (Monrovia, CA), a developer of laser welding, marking and cutting systems. “In recent years, there’s been a lot of movement in medical to laser welding for the obvious
Image courtesy Miyachi Unitek Corp.
Fiber-laser-cut parts (right) offer more speed and much greater precision than EDM-produced parts for medical applications.
reasons—noncontact, very flexible, highly controllable, and you can weld really small parts, which is obviously very good for the medical industry.”
Medical device builders have shown increasing inter- est in lasers for cutting many different devices, from can- nulars, needles, arthroscopic devices, endoscopes and other products, Shannon notes. “It’s all minimally inva- sive tooling, so the tools are very thin tubing, and normally they need to have some slots or holes for other things to either attach or kind of be fed through,” he says.
In the medical industry,
there is some interest in picosecond lasers, Shannon says, adding the technology can offer a unique processing capa- bility for metals and plastics though it is somewhat at the