FEATURE: CUTTING
Amada’s Locus Beam Control can create different beam patterns, which improves cutting speed and quality for different materials and thicknesses
The official launch of Ventis will be in May 2019 in Japan, and then in Europe during the second half of this year. ‘Its [Ventis’s] real strength is nitrogen
cutting, especially stainless steel and aluminium, but mild steel as well,’ explained Matt Wood, senior product manager at Amada Europe. ‘It’s also very good for oxygen cutting mild steel, but our Ensis machines are good at that anyway.’ Compared to a standard 4kW solid-
state laser, Ventis is 222 per cent faster at nitrogen cutting 8mm aluminium, according to tests made by Amada. ‘This puts it in the cutting speed range of what would be achieved by a laser machine equivalent to 6kW – but it’s only a 4kW machine,’ Wood emphasised. ‘On stainless steel and aluminium, it’s verging into 6kW and 8kW territory for cutting speed,’ he added. The Ventis also improves upon the quality of the cut edge – by more than 50 per cent for 12mm stainless steel, according to Amada. This makes it close to the surface finish achieved with a CO2
laser, which still
is superior to solid-state laser nitrogen cutting, particularly for stainless steel. ‘We had a lot of customers at Euroblech look at it [the cut surface], and quite a few comments were: “This is finally the machine that can replace my 4kW CO2
to be a common theme; it’s particularly for people that want higher-quality cutting,’ Wood said.
The machine is also able to minimise
dross underneath the cut, which reduces secondary processing. ‘If we can cut aluminium and stainless steel and it’s free from dross underneath, that can save a
“Compared to a standard 4kW solid- state laser, Ventis is 222 per cent faster at nitrogen cutting 8mm aluminium”
significant amount of overall production time,’ Wood added. For thin plate cutting dross is reasonably
easy to avoid, but for thick plate cutting dross is always an issue, according to Wetzig at Fraunhofer IWS. ‘If you can avoid dross, you can avoid expensive post processing,’ he said. The Ventis fibre laser engine is a 4kW
”. That seemed
single-diode module. The engineers at Amada developed the 4kW diode module specifically for the Ventis to avoid losing beam quality when combining multiple diode modules. The high beam quality maximises the effect of the LBC technology on cutting. Wood explained that for the mid- thickness range – 4mm to 10mm – the Ventis would give an option to cut at high speed, or cut slightly slower but at higher quality. Moving to 12mm and 15mm stainless steel, however, the cut speed and the quality converge. Amada’s 12mm stainless steel test sample, which showed greater than 50 per cent improvement in cut quality, was also processed at 150 per
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cent of the standard 4kW cutting speed. In addition, the dross was reduced by 85 per cent on that sample, compared to a standard 4kW solid-state laser, according to the company.
Gas powered Higher laser power is good for the feed rate and for cutting quality, but the downside is that higher power lasers need more electricity to run; they require more cooling capacity, and the engineers have to take care of the optics. ‘Cutting uses transmissive optics and it’s not easy to keep the optics clean over time. It’s easy to buy a high-power laser and hook it up to the machine, but you have to have a processing head that is able to withstand the power over a long time without a lot of maintenance,’ explained Wetzig. Focus shift in the laser beam is one thing
that can lead to lower power density on the workpiece. It is caused by thermal effects on the laser’s optical components, and is something the German cutting machine supplier Messer Cutting Systems looked to minimise in its laser cutting machines with a software algorithm it developed using measurements from Ophir’s BeamWatch beam profiling device. BeamWatch is a non-contact device that measures Rayleigh radiation scattered from the beam to calculate the beam profile. The profiler can take measurements at video frame rates, which makes it possible to see any shift in focus.
The benefit of the abundance of laser
power is that laser oxygen cutting, which is used to cut thick mild steel, is now being
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Amada
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