The most used lasers are infrared, green and UV systems at the moment. A new type, blu-ray semiconductor laser has started to attract some attention since 2017. Today, we want to introduce a leading technology from Laserline, blu-ray semiconductor laser (blu-ray laser). What is a blu-ray laser? How about the application potential? In the following text, Markus Ruetering, Asia sales manager of Laserline, will give us answers.
Question:
Laserline is a professional leading semiconductor lasers supplier, so what products should we focus on in this year?
Markus:
As a leading company in diode lasers, we keep developing our updated developments, so we are now manufacturing our diode lasers of its sixth generation already. We’ve already introduced our sixth generation of diode lasers to the world, which are suitable for several applications, with laser power levels in the range from 1 kW up to 25 kW. We also develop our own processing optics, where we can cover applications like brazing, hardening, heat treatment, cladding, and plastic welding as well as newer applications like additive manufacturing or tape laying of CFRP’s. Our highlight of this year is a diode laser having a blue radiation of 450 nm. And we give it a high expectation.
Question :
What are the advantages of blue laser?
Markus:
The blu-ray laser with a wavelength of 450 nm has a very high absorption into materials which have a high reflection for classical wavelengths emitted by industrial lasers, so called non-ferrous metals, especially for copper, gold as well as silver materials. It has slightly better absorption into aluminum, but our focus with blue lasers is mainly on copper materials, as well as gold and silver. So when we look into the application that is considered from companies in terms of batteries, electronics, and the so called e-mobility – electro mobility.
We need to do a lot of copper application in terms of welding, and it is found and reported in a lot of investigations that lasers in the infrared section, infrared wavelength, cannot weld copper materials with the reason of process window or sometimes can not weld at all. Welding copper with a 1 µm laser will create a lot of spatter, so if you have done an application, for example, in the battery industry, you have to clean the part after the welding. If you do this welds with a blue laser, the absorption is so high that you need much less power. We can do a lot of applications already by using 500W blu-ray lasers while we need several kilowatts infrared laser for the same application. We have a heat conduction welding rather than a keyhole welding, and the heat conduction welding helps us to have spatter-free welding of the samples, compared with this, it has a lower power, higher efficiency, and also the advantage of having a clean production.
Question:
In 2017, laser with new wavelengths attracted the attention in the market, and Laserline's counterpart is blu-ray laser, so what's the difference between them?
Markus:
The general advantage of blu-ray laser compared to either fiber lasers or disc lasers is that we have a direct conversion from electricity to light, so it doesn’t have the additional light-to-light converting procedure like disc and fiber laser, and the system in the overall efficiency is higher. When we look at the application of, like say, copper, people are actually using green lasers into this field, but to create a green laser, you have to create an infrared light first, and then you have to transfer the infrared light into green light, and this is a high loss of efficiency.
It increases the cost a lot, and investigations of the application have shown that a green laser is not capable of the same applications like blue, so the blu-ray lasers that we are offering has no converter inside the system, or any frequency doubling crystal, etc. We are making blue light straight from the diode, which is the highest efficiency possible in such a setup. And the blue light is having such high absorption as I mentioned before that it can reach to a factor of 20 and higher when welding copper, incomparable by other existing technologies.
Question:
Could you please introduce the project achievement of your blu-ray laser? Is Laserline in a leading position in terms of blu-ray lasers now?
Markus:
Laserline has been taking part in a three-year German government-funded project for two years. It is devoted to developing high-power blu-ray lasers. The goal is to build a kilowatt blue laser. It has the highest power today, but it hasn't done it on its own, it's a funded project from the German government.
The power we actually have in our laboratory is 700W, and that is, as far as we know, a world record in terms of available power in blue. We have done a lot of trails in our application lab already using 100/500/600W today with very good results.
We have not released the laser as a product, because we first want to run through the project with our partners. Afterwards, I’m pretty sure that the blue laser will be the better technology compared to any doubling or tripling frequency that we have seen from other systems.
