Laser Material Processing

The use of lasers for industrial marking and materials processing has seen rapid growth in recent years. Here, a high-intensity laser is used to mark, melt or in other way modify the exposed material relative to its surrounding.

Until now, the dominant approach in this application has resulted in a single beam raster over the work surface by galvo scan mirrors. While the focused beam is effective in generating the intensity needed to modify the material, the throughput of such systems is limited as the area is written sequentially using just a single beam.

Recent advances in total available laser power are enabling higher productivity alternatives. For example, by replacing the scan mirror with a spatial light modulator, the single beam is turned into hundreds or thousands of beamlets all writing to the surface in parallel. Clearly, this throughput boost requires a spatial light modulator with outstanding power-handling capability.

We have created a laser marking system to demonstrate the benefits of using the PLV^™. This system uses a 1064 nm, 10ps, 100W laser to illuminate the PLV^™. The PLV^™ is then imaged with a de-magnification of 10 times to give high fluence with 10 µm resolution at the work surface. This system was designed for making black marks on stainless steel, but has also been used on aluminum, plastic and graphite.