Lasers in Industry

Lasers are used in industry in a huge variety of applications. These applications can be divided between those that involve the processing of materials and all other applications. Materials processing includes cutting, drilling, welding, etc., and generally involves the use of high-powered lasers.

Materials Processing

The advantages of using lasers in materials processing include:

there is no contact tool required, unlike normal machining in which the tool bit must be sharpened and often replaced.

brittle or very pliable materials that are very difficult or impossible to machine with tools can be processed using lasers. In fact, one of the first materials processing applications of a laser in the 1960's was to make the holes in rubber baby bottle nipples, a difficult task to do otherwise with drilling.

using fiber optics, access to previously inaccessible locations is available.

laser processing is easily automated to allow computer and robot control.

new types of processing has and continues to be developed, including producing new surface alloys and hardening of materials.

Some of the problems with using lasers for processing include:

certain tasks, such as drilling large diameter holes, are difficult to accomplish with lasers, as we will see.

lasers and optics work best in clean and vibration-free environments, often difficult to achieve on the manufacturing floor.

initial costs can be large and so laser systems have been limited to large industry

Let's now discuss how a laser interacts with materials differently as the laser power is increased (see the figure below). At low power, the surface of the material gets heated, depending on the material properties for absorption and conduction of heat. A mirror clearly reflects most of the light, while a dull black surface absorbs most of the light. Better conductive properties means that the heat will flow more quickly and the local temperature will not get as hot. When the laser power increases sufficiently to increase the temperature enough, the surface begins to melt, turning from solid to liquid. If the power is considerably higher, the material may directly vaporize, the surface atoms turning to a gas. At even higher powers these gas molecules that form become ionized to form what is known as a plasma, a cloud of charged ions. At this point, the efficiency dramatically drops because the plasma begins to block the incident laser beam.

Depending on the kind of material processing needed, the intensity range of the laser, as well as its pulse duration, since most applications use pulsed lasers, will be determined.

A major low intensity application is heat treating surfaces. Local heating changes the crystal properties of the material and can actually harden it. This is known as transformational hardening and it is just like the blacksmith's used to do in heating horseshoes and pounding on them to make them harder. Another example is the production of artificial diamonds by taking graphite, a form of carbon used in pencil lead, and putting in under extremely high pressure. Today, carbon dioxide lasers are used to harden steel for the automotive industry for cylinders in the engine and other parts.

At somewhat higher intensities melting will occur and this opens up a large area of welding applications. Welding is the fusion of two different metals together into a solid joint. Most of you have seen this when you get a car muffler replaced and two pieces of metal tubing need to be joined rigidly in an air-tight manner. A solder material is used and the metal surfaces are heated until the metals actually melt and fuse together. There are a wide range of welding applications, ranging from making ship hulls to micro-joints inside glass vacuum tubes or on printed electronic circuit boards.

At higher intensities still there is direct vaporization of material and both drilling and cutting applications abound. In the case of drilling, examples of applications that would be difficult to drill using mechanical drills include making holes in ceramics, which are brittle and easily shattered (these are often used in the microelectronics industry as electrical insulators), in rubber, which is also difficult to drill because of its elastic properties, and in diamond, the hardest material known, which previously had to be drilled with diamond tool bits that wore out rapidly. Two other interesting examples include making the holes in aerosol can valves and making the microscopic holes in time-release capsules, where the number and size of the holes regulates the rate of time-release.

Drilling with a laser does have some problems. Because such high intensities are needed to vaporize metal, the laser beams must be focused and therefore the holes produced, especially if deep, tend to be somewhat conical since the beam tapers at the focal point. Holes can only be drilled in metals to about 10 times the focused beam diameter before the intensity becomes too weak, although much larger holes can be drilled by moving the beam and actually cutting the border of the hole rather than vaporizing the entire plug of metal from the hole. Another problem is that often the vaporized metal tends to re-deposit on the walls of the hole and so usually a jet of gas is blown over the hole to remove the metal vapors.

Cutting is similar to drilling - the beam is simply moves along the material, or vice versa. For non-reflective materials (wood, plastic, cloth) this works directly but if the surfaces are shiny, often oxygen is blown over the surface near the focused beam and the oxygen is used to burn away the metal in a process known as laser-assisted cutting.