DIODE LASERS
Pelaprat. ‘Te value exists for all metals. It’s a very large market.’ Yellow metals benefit most from processing
A blue diode bar emitting slightly above threshold
hundred watts. With this, you can start material processing.’ At Photonics West, Nuburu showed a 150W
blue diode laser module, the AO-150, which it launched in 2017, while Shimadzu was exhibiting 100W modules. Nuburu also gave a scientific presentation during the high-power laser session at the show, reporting a prototype device with 730W of blue laser power. Nuburu intends to launch a 500W laser late this year, and the company has a roadmap to go to multi-kilowatt power levels, Pelaprat said. Nuburu’s technology combines single
gallium nitride diodes from Osram Opto Semiconductors with micro lenses; multiple diode beams are collimated into a single beam, which is then coupled inside an optical fibre. ‘Te technology around the micro
optics, the fast axis and slow axis collimators, and the macro optics to combine this into a fibre, is where a large part of the knowhow of Nuburu resides,’ Pelaprat said. Meanwhile, Laserline presented
work at Photonics West on a 700W fibre-coupled CW diode laser, operating at 450nm with 60mm mrad beam quality. Tese are results from the first two years of the three-year Blaulas project, which aims to build a kilowatt blue diode laser. Osram, Coherent-Dilas and the Max Born Institute are all partners.
with blue laser diodes because of higher absorption at 450nm versus absorption at 1µm – gold is more than 100 times more absorbing in the blue than the infrared. But processing copper is where the blue laser could come into its own. Te metal has 65 per cent absorption in blue wavelengths versus 5 per cent in the infrared, 13 times higher absorption. Aluminium is three times better absorbing – 15 per cent in the blue compared to 5 per cent for infrared – while stainless steel is only 50 per cent higher for blue compared to infrared. ‘At low power, some of our customers using
customers using the [blue] laser for copper welding have reported a speed increase of 8 to 10 times versus infrared lasers
Some of our
Benefits of blue ‘All metals have higher absorption of blue wavelengths [than the infrared],’ commented
the laser for copper welding applications have reported a speed increase of eight to ten times versus infrared lasers,’ reported Pelaprat. Most applications that would use blue diode lasers are for welding at the moment, largely because of the lower beam quality compared to fibre or disk lasers. ‘In general, a 200-250W
blue laser is equivalent to a 1.2-1.5kW infrared laser in terms of welding speed for copper,’ Pelaprat continued. ‘It is about a factor of eight better, but it depends upon the metal you are joining. It requires almost an order of magnitude less power to perform the same
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Coherent-Dilas
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