DIODE LASERS FEATURE


now owned by Panasonic, is one company that’s already producing a high-brightness diode system for cutting metal. It claims a beam parameter product of 3mm-mrad from a fibre-coupled direct diode laser with an output power of 2kW, equal to a brightness of 2,293MW/cm2–sr. The company also offers kilowatt-class direct diode lasers for metal processing with a brightness of 6,800MW/cm2–sr, which equals that of comparable fibre lasers, according to its website. Japanese machine tool builder Mazak is one of the early adopters of Teradiode’s technology for sheet metal cutting. At Fabtech in Las Vegas last November, Mazak was demonstrating a direct diode machine – using Teradiode’s laser technology – side by side with a fibre laser. In the demonstration, a 4kW Mazak


direct diode system was able to cut 9mm stainless steel 44 per cent faster than a 4kW fibre laser. The same diode system- cut 1mm copper 50 per cent faster than the fibre laser. It was 10 per cent faster cutting 9mm mild steel, 18 per cent faster cutting 1mm aluminium and 14 per cent faster cutting 1mm stainless steel. ‘Across all material types and


thicknesses up to 9mm, the 4kW direct diode laser was faster than a 4kW fibre laser,’ Rajiv Pandey, senior product line manager at Teradiode, told Laser Systems Europe last year. Mazak adopting Teradiode’s systems is


testament to direct diode lasers’ ability to cut sheet metal, but it’s still an incredibly young technology. ‘Right now, in my eyes, it’s still a little too early for high brightness direct diode technology for cutting,’ commented Biesenbach, in an article for Laser Systems Europe last year. Coherent Dilas director, Klaus Kleine, added in the


same article: ‘Diode laser systems made for very high brightness applications less than 20mm-mrad look very complex to me.’ Kleine continued: ‘I believe that the best brightness converter is still the fibre laser. The fibre laser seems to be the more elegant solution for now. I expect that to change, but it will take time.’ ‘Fibre lasers have a hold on the 2D cutting market,’ said Teradiode’s Pandey. ‘What we learned from our customers – machine builders – is that moving to a different technology, and even to a different power level, requires a lot of effort from their side – all the different cut parameters


“The diode laser has the potential to become the next workhorse in the industry”


and recipes that they have to test. It’s a fairly big investment for machine builders and they have to do a lot of qualification work, building machines in the lab and testing prototypes. It’s probably a six months-to-a-year runway to adopt this technology. ‘If you look at the installed bases using


direct diode lasers, it’s very small,’ he continued. ‘Diode reliability is at the heart of our whole system. We think reliability is good enough to be made at an industrial scale. After that it’s the type of application that really matters, as to where the technology fits in.’ Although, at the moment, fibre lasers


are the more established technology for high-power, high-brightness industrial applications like cutting, it seems there


is every possibility that diodes could take more of the share of the market. When asked whether fibre lasers could


ever take over from fibre lasers for metal cutting, Coherent Dilas’ Biesenbach said that, technically, this is possible – and has been demonstrated with their TBar technology – but, again, it comes down to cost. ‘We are not yet at a level where a diode laser concept can compete with fibre laser costs for metal cutting, which is by far the largest application for industrial lasers,’ he said. As diode technology improves, however, Biensenbach pointed out that the costs for external wavelength stabilisation, beam shaping and multiplexing could be reduced.


In addition, the single emitter beam needs to have high fundamental mode quality – which, he said, new high-power designs can achieve – but that mode quality has to be stable enough for use in a production line. ‘The day these functional elements


are integrated features of the diode laser chip, the diode laser has the potential to become the next workhorse in the industry after generations of CO2 and fibre lasers,’ Biensenbach commented. ‘Eventually, diode lasers could come to dominate metal cutting. ‘In my opinion, the most advanced diode


lasers are those that can be produced using automated means at high yield and high quality,’ he continued, ‘and which are modular and scalable in power and flexible in beam quality and even wavelength. These diode lasers will be most accepted by the market – that is, utilising the specific diode laser chip output characteristics that differ from classic laser cavities that we know from CO2 and solid-state lasers.’ EO


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