ANALYSIS: INVESTMENT
Bounce-back grant funds new laser erosion cutting service
Andrew May, director of ES Precision, describes the firm’s recent investment in new laser technology to unlock exciting application sectors
ES Precision is an Oxford- based company providing laser processing services to technology companies in the UK and Ireland. The business is privately-owned by myself, a physicist, and Tim Millard, an engineer, each with decades of laser industry experience. Our niche is galvo laser
processing with five different types of laser. Galvo laser processing uses a pair of extremely rapid mirrors to deflect in the x and y directions and uses a flatfield lens to create a processing area in the range of 80 to 300mm2, depending on focal length chosen. The range of lasers we use enables us to mark or engrave most parts, and cut or drill most thin materials. We use CO2 lasers to mark and cut plastics (for example ‘Traffolyte’ laminate for rigid signage), wood, leather, fabrics and laminated reel- to-reel tamper-evident label materials (Tesa laser labels). Our frequency-tripled vanadate laser provides extremely high beam quality in the UV wavelength (355nm), which can produce high quality dark marks on some plastics that 1μm wavelength lasers cannot. At 1μm output we use YAG, vanadate and fibre lasers to mark metals and most plastics.
28 LASER SYSTEMS EUROPE AUTUMN 2021
Our 20W fibre laser can also be used to cut and drill metallic foils and very thin (around 0.2mm) sheet metal.
Spotting an opportunity In recent years we have seen increasing opportunities to provide a service to cut fine structures in thicker metals (0.2 to 2mm) for motorsport, electronics, aerospace, medical device and instrumentation manufacturing. Examples include: profiling fine serpentine structures for flexible heater elements (such as those in car seats) and motor laminations in electrical steel for new motor and generator designs; cutting molybdenum x-ray targets; drilling and cutting components of fuel cells, batteries and bioanalysis equipment, where platinum and exotic metals are used as catalysts for chemical reactions. Compared to the 20W fibre
laser we currently use, a 100W fibre laser would be able to cut faster and process more than five times the metal thickness, owing to the nonlinear nature of laser ablation. Using a process known as erosion cutting, such a laser can make multiple passes (sometimes hundreds) at very high speeds. The same pattern is traced out with each pass, ablating several microns of material with each pass, until a complete cut is made. Unlike traditional fusion laser
cutting, material is cleanly ablated away, rather than being melted and then blown out of the kerf by high pressure gas. For very thin materials and tiny fragile profile shapes to be cut, supporting the metal foil on a bed of nails and high flow gas injection is often not a good solution. An investment case to offer a unique service in the UK using medium power fibre laser erosion cutting therefore looked interesting to us.
Overcoming investment challenges Our company is a micro SME (fewer than 10 employees; less than €2m turnover) and during the four years since its foundation, all funding has been provided by the directors or from the reinvestment of profits. After year one we invested in the UV laser and after year two a machining centre was purchased. Year three concluded in the middle of the pandemic, which squeezed profits owing to many sectors contracting. This was frustrating as we wanted to develop the erosion cutting plan. Retention of control of the business and a cautious approach to growth are important to us, but rather than delay the plan for growth we decided to see if government ‘bounce back’ funding could be secured. Oxfordshire Local Enterprise Partnership (OxLEP) offers funding via the UK Government’s £900m ‘Getting Building Fund’, which aims to deliver jobs, skills
and infrastructure across the country in areas facing the biggest economic challenges as a result of the pandemic. Despite never having applied for any grant in 25 years as company directors, we felt that the capital investment project was such a close match to OxLEP’s Business Investment Fund aims, that we should apply. The online application
process was straightforward, since the fit between several of ES Precision’s target markets (such as fuel cells and photovoltaics) matched some of the fund’s zero carbon objectives. Other expected applications in the biotech, instrumentation and lab-on-a- chip applications naturally fell in with the Covid zeitgeist. Concern that the application
process might become too time-consuming was not justified, not least because it was structured as a two-step process, so that only after the expression of interest passed to the shortlist was it necessary to commit to a lengthier submission. Overall, it took just 12 weeks from deciding to apply to learning of the grant being secured.
The investment We chose to invest in Coherent’s Powerline F series 100W fibre laser marker as its software is compatible with our other four Rofin laser markers and its CAN-bus control architecture allows us to configure it to control other motion systems such as xy
Keyence’s Image Dimension Measuring System for QA on cut profiles
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