On April 21, NUBURU, a U.S. manufacturer of high-power and high-brightness industrial blue lasers, announced that it has expanded its intellectual property portfolio with new patents that will cover a wide range of blue lasers for welding and other applications.
In recent years, more and more customers in the market are looking to phase out slow, costly process operations such as ultrasonic and resistance welding. Nuburu's blue laser is targeted at addressing two key manufacturing challenges for metal connections in mega-trend markets such as electric vehicles and consumer electronics: low throughput and slow processing.
While the production of blue lasers goes back as far as a few decades, the transition to mass production is driving customer demand for faster, non-contact processes that are not subject to low utilization and high maintenance costs. Infrared lasers eliminate contact and speed limitations; however, they are very inefficient due to the infrared color of the light, resulting in partial damage that ultimately prevents them from being used in some battery soldering.
NUBURU blue lasers address the need for non-contact, high-speed, low to no-defect processes for manufacturing batteries and electric vehicles. Today, even the megatrends in the electric vehicle market cannot offset the impact of low yields in traditional processes. Yield directly corresponds to short and late production costs, warranty risk and customer safety (battery fires), and NUBURU addresses exactly this set of pain points faced by customers.
The NUBURU blue laser portfolio has also made significant progress in market adoption in other key market segments such as consumer electronics. The yield of conventional processes is not offset today, even by the megatrends of the electric vehicle market. They needed to address inefficient, time-consuming processes that created limitations in production volume and productivity.
After a 12-18 month application and technology qualification process, NUBURU's AO laser has now been used for over a year in the production of cell phone homogenization plates. The process involves welding thin copper less than 200 microns, a fraction of the size of a cell phone, consistently and very quickly. In contrast, customers have been more disappointed with infrared lasers. While conventional infrared fiber lasers offer a non-contact method, they simply cut the material rather than weld it due to the low absorption of infrared wavelengths.
Blue Laser provides customers with the ideal solution for a non-contact, repeatable, high-speed solution that is 10-100 times faster than the original method. Launched in January, the NUBURU BL combined with the scanner further increases customer value with faster speeds, more accurate weld geometries and lower cost of ownership.
About Nuburu
Founded in 2015 and headquartered in Colorado, NUBURU is a developer and manufacturer of industrial blue lasers that use fundamental physics and their high brightness, high power design to produce faster, higher quality lasers in materials processing than currently available alternatives, including laser welding and additive manufacturing of copper, gold, aluminum and other industrially important metals. NUBURU's industrial blue lasers form precise and even defect-free welds about eight times faster than conventional methods.
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