There are many types of laser cutting machines based on their technology and functionalities. There are three main types of lasers used in laser cutting. They are:
CO2 laser
water-jet guided laser
Fiber Lasers
Let’s now discuss fiber lasers. These lasers are a type of solid-state laser which is growing fast within the metal cutting industry. This technology uses a solid gain medium, which is contrary to CO2 lasers using a gas or liquid. In these lasers, the active gain medium is an optical fiber doped with rare-earth elements such as erbium, neodymium, praseodymium, holmium, ytterbium, dysprosium, and holmium. They all are related to doped fiber amplifiers which are meant to provide light amplification without lasing. The laser beam is produced by seed laser and is then amplified within a glass fiber. Fiber lasers provide wavelength up to 1.064 micrometers. Due to this wavelength, they produce an extremely small spot size. This spot size is up to 100 times smaller compared to the CO2. This feature of fiber lasers makes it ideal for cutting reflective metal material. This is one of the ways in which fiber lasers are more advantageous than CO2. Stimulated Raman scattering and four-wave mixing are some of the types of fiber nonlinearity which can provide gain and that’s why serve as gain media for a fiber laser.
Fiber laser cutting machines are widely used for various industrial applications. Following are the features of these machines which make these machines so popular.
Fiber lasers have higher wall-plug efficiency as compared to other laser cutting machines.
These machines give the advantage of maintenance-free operation.
These machines have the special feature of easy ‘plug and play ‘design.
Moreover, they are extremely compact and hence very easy to install.
Fiber lasers are known as the phenomenal BPP where BPP stands for beam parameter product. They also provide steady BPP over the whole power range.
These machines are known to possess high photon conversion efficiency.
There is higher flexibility of beam delivery in case of fiber lasers as compared to other laser cutting machines.
These machines allow the processing of highly reflective materials too.
They provide lower cost of ownership.
Above feature make these fiber lasers cutting machines very advantageous as compared to others and so popularly used in various applications. For more information, you can search fiber laser cutting machine.
Post time: Jan-26-2019