Materials Processing with a High Power Laser

Summary

Sub-kilowatt CO₂ lasers have been steadily gaining acceptance as tools for processing a wide variety of materials over the past few years and engineers are increasingly acknowledging their usefulness. This field of expertise can now be dramatically extended with a new, rugged 5 kW CO₂ industrial laser that is recently commercially available in the UK. Such a laser offers the opportunity of designing machine tool systems, suitable for volume production work in deep penetration welding, surface alloying, transformation hardening of metals and cutting, and some aspects of this are discussed.

A brief description of a transverse gas flow laser is given and methods of manipulating and safely controlling the laser beam are discussed. Methods are outlined for using the laser beam to achieve the various processes and some practical processing results are given.