On-Line Diagnostic System for CO₂-Lasers to Control Production Quality

Abstract

Laserwork in industry demands reproducible results over long time periods. One requirement to match this needs is to guarantee always the same beam qualities as laser power, beam direction, mode structure and beam caustic. Especially high power lasers may change these beam qualities by aging of the output coupler or other optical components, e.g. by temperature changes in the laser. To avoid an influence to material processing by such changes a real time laser diagnostic system has been developed and will be described which uses a simple technique to convert the infrared laser beam into electrical signals while material processing. These signals can be calibrated and further processed for control and inspection.