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FIBRE LASERS


FIBRE FUTURE OF


Greg Blackman explores advances being made in fibre lasers, now the dominant technology for material processing


F gradually taking over from older CO2


ibre lasers are now the dominant force in materials processing. Efficient, reliable, able to reach multi-kilowatt power levels, and now a mature technology, they are laser


machines. So, what does the future hold for fibre lasers? Te first thing to consider is power. While


power isn’t everything, the trend to higher power seems likely to continue for the moment. IPG Photonics has delivered a 100kW laser to one of its customers, according to Michael Stark, product manager, marketing and sales at IPG, adding that the company has ‘headroom to increase the output power to 500kW’. ‘Higher process speed is a trend in many


applications,’ Stark commented. ‘In cutting applications, for example, real industrial


machine installations are reaching 15kW output power.’ Fewer machines are inevitably going to be


sold at the top end of the power spectrum. Jack Gabzdyl, vice president of marketing and business development at SPI Lasers, puts power levels for most cutting machines as moving towards 6kW, while Jin Christen, senior product line manager, macro materials processing at Lumentum, quotes 3kW to 6kW as the norm. Matt Wood, senior product


manager at Amada Europe, commented: ‘Higher power is all well and good, but it gets to a point where you get diminishing returns.’ Amada showed a 9kW fibre laser at Blechexpo, the trade fair for sheet metal processing held in Stuttgart, Germany in November. ‘Tose higher powers are for people that are consistently cutting mid- to thick-range material. Tat’s where the benefit lies, but you’ve got to be cutting a lot to make the cost per part competitive because you’re paying more for the machine. ‘Te biggest thing to increase the adoption of


thing to increase the adoption of fibre lasers isn’t going to be power, it’s going to be sheet handling


The biggest


fibre lasers isn’t going to be power, it’s going to be the sheet handling, the automation side of it,’ Wood continued. Wood ran a test comparing how long fibre laser machines ranging from 2kW to 9kW took to cut a 1mm stainless steel window frame. He found that the 9kW fibre laser was only one second faster than the 2kW system; the part had a lot of internal detail, so it was only on the straight edge that the higher power lasers reached maximum speed. ‘Te power is dependent on the type of processing,’ he said. ‘If it’s a job shop cutting straightforward parts 24/7, then higher power will be a benefit.’ As fibre lasers are able to cut


faster, the bottleneck then becomes the time it takes to load and unload the part. Wood said that, in the future, the advances will be adding quicker automation to the machine to take advantage of the higher fibre speed. He said: ‘We oſten come up against this; customers will be


fixated with having a 6kW system, whereas for the work they are doing they’d get more productivity out of a 4kW laser with a loading tower. We don’t want to get caught up in the


SPI Lasers has added process monitoring to its fibre lasers 18 LASER SYSTEMS EUROPE ISSUE 37 • WINTER 2017 @lasersystemsmag | www.lasersystemseurope.com


SPI Lasers


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