Aug. 19, 2024
Selecting a suitable fiber laser cutting machine challenges beginners due to the market varieties. The equipment is famous in the commercial and industrial automotive industry for its precision and faster cutting speed.
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You need in-depth knowledge to identify which is ideal for engraving, etching, drilling, cutting, and marking projects.
This article will discuss how a fiber laser cutting machine works and its importance in the automobile manufacturing industry. We&#;ll also explain their applications in manufacturing and factors to consider before selecting.
A fiber cutting machine uses a high-power density laser beam to manipulate various materials. It can process incredibly thick metal components with protective coatings into desired shapes and patterns.
The fiber laser cutting technology produces intense, concentrated heat through optics to vaporize or etch non-ferrous, non-metallic, or metallic items. They&#;re perfect for cutting silver, copper, galvanized sheets, aluminum, alloy, carbon, and stainless steel.
A fiber laser cutting machine has in-built technology offering consistent high-quality accuracy and unparalleled speed. It allows users to recreate specified patterns with precise automotive industry smooth cuts.
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The laser machine works with active optical fibers that transmit a focused light beam to the cutting head.
Fiber laser cutting machine beams are narrow, bright, and easy to use in a specific direction. They&#;re perfect for surface modification and can mark, cut, drill, and engrave various metals.
Unlike traditional cutting, you can etch, shape, and trim objects with a laser. A fixed beam, moving arms, and beam delivery are the fiber laser marking machine&#;s working components at their core.
The fixed beam is a mechanical process that enables a robot to move material before the light rays. The arm allows repeated movements, letting the laser cut items into different patterns. Lastly, the beam delivers fiber optics, articulating the laser power for complex shape cuts.
Laser cutting machines&#; smooth, precise cuts and high production efficiency are essential in manufacturing the automotive industry.
A fiber laser cutting machine processes automotive materials into slimmer parts using computer numerical control (CNC) technology. It&#;s also versatile in design complexity and flexibility since it can process rubber, glass, fabrics, and plastics.
A laser CNC machine is cost-effective compared to conventional processing methods. It can cut materials in large, medium, and small batches to meet individual needs.
High precision and faster cutting speed are a few benefits of laser cutting technology in the automotive sector. Machining complex materials and versatility are other pros.
These industry tools have an innovative approach offering quick turnaround with high cutting precision when cutting materials. The accuracy of a laser cutting machine is due to its in-built computer numerical control (CNC) technology.
A laser CNC machine has a thin laser beam, enabling precise cuts without material waste. It&#;s ideal for laser welding and etching intricate patterns and designs. It ensures cutting precision on an industrial mass-produced product like a fender, body panel, hood, and door.
Fiber laser machines offer faster cutting speed that frequently replaces conventional processes.
The technique takes less time with the right equipment in the automobile manufacturing industry. The laser machine speed efficiency directly relates to the equipment&#;s power.
You can cut materials five times faster with it, unlike utilizing CO2 laser conventional manufacturing methods.
Another advantage of a fiber laser cutting machine is its versatility. It&#;s ideal for cutting rubber products, sheets, metal, paper, silicone, and wood for commercial and industrial purposes. Users can process items into styles and patterns based on the operator&#;s settings.
Fiber laser machines can engrave and etch materials for various applications under different operating conditions. Manufacturers use these tools for marking automotive parts to identify products through the supply chain.
Fiber laser machines are helpful in the automotive industry for machining complex functional material properties. They have excellent adaptability to difficult-to-machine items like cemented carbide or alloy.
Ceramics are hard and brittle, making machining difficult with conventional techniques. But fiber laser machines can cut and drill through these complex automotive parts without damaging the surface.
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There are various applications of fiber laser cutting. Below are the uses for the automotive manufacturing industry to cut with the tools and examples of their usage.
You can streamline producing high-quality automotive parts with a laser cutting machine. Some materials to cut with these tools include the following:
Manufacturers use a fiber laser cutting machine in different ways. They include:
Cutting Leather: Many automobile makers use laser machines to cut leather in comfortable car seats.
Sealing or Cutting Seat Belts and Airbags: These machines can cut and seal airbags without damage. You can trim and shape these materials in a fitting and paneling area with a laser cutter before stitching for excellent structural integrity.
Fabric: Vehicle interiors often contain different textiles and upholstery fabrics. Producers cut the materials faster with these tools. They seal edges to prevent fraying when assembling the seat.
Plastic Parts: Producers cut plastic components with laser machines to make dashboards, license plates, bumpers, light housing, spoilers, and interior panels.
Polycarbonate, polypropylene, high-density polyethylene, and acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) are common materials.
Metal Parts: Laser cutters can cut various metal car parts, including exhaust systems, hoods, doors, fenders, gears, shafts, and bearings.
Many beginners make mistakes when choosing a fiber laser cutting machine for the automotive industry. Consider these factors when selecting suitable equipment for your manufacturing processes.
Consider the power requirements of a fiber laser cutting machine because it determines the equipment cutting speed and quality. A tool with W can cut through thicker materials than those with 500W output.
These machines have low, medium, and high power ratings. A medium and low-power tool is sufficient for most applications. With excellent cutting speed, it can cut, drill, and etch thin carbon plates and stainless steel materials.
High-power laser cutters often have hardware requirements, and upgrading comes at a cost. Consider your material thickness before selecting a tool for the project.
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Since cutting speed links to the equipment power, consider the precision requirements before choosing. They&#;re the most influential factors, so check the machine positioning cut accuracy and laser geometric on a material.
Examine the process with a microscope for selection. Thanks to these machines&#; computer numerically controlled (CNC) technology, you&#;ll correctly cut and drill various metals. It ensures flexible processing and low maintenance costs for automobile production.
Fiber laser machines are best for cutting materials up to 13mm thick. Although the cutting capabilities depend on the equipment&#;s power, consider the item you&#;re cutting before choosing any tool to fulfill your needs.
When using a CO2 laser of 10kW power, you can cut aluminum up to 30mm and mild steel up to 2mm. It might also drill and engrave thicker leather, plastic, ceramics, and glass.
Another factor to consider when choosing a laser cutter is the computer numerical control (CNC) machine size and capacity. Carefully select equipment based on your project requirements.
A laser cutting machine can perform the cutting and etching job excellently. Be careful with selection, as smaller bed sizes and those with capacity limitations will affect your ability to produce automobile bodies in large volumes.
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Laser technology will play a significant role in the future of the automotive industry. Manufacturers can also weld different car components and insulation mats and cut metal sheets into various shapes.
This technology with heat absorbent fiberglass composites offers accuracy and superior precision. It ensures each component fits the other seamlessly. Laser engraving can create decorative surface designs such as automobile doors, car wheels, handles, and dashboards.
The future looks promising for these machines as they can design items for tracking and detecting. Adopting the technology will continue to improve in speed and efficiency of production processes. So users should expect to see more innovative applications in the future.
Now you know the importance of laser technology in the automobile industry, consider choosing the right equipment. The best tool should offer carbon fiber reinforced composites with high precision, versatility, and faster cutting speed.
With the technology, you design car doors, dashboard and shape seats, fenders, bumpers, knitted spacer fabrics, and engine components.
Buy efficient fiber laser cutting equipment with excellent features only from reputable producers. Baison Laser is the best manufacturer of this commercial and industrial tool.
Contact us today for a consultation, and we&#;ll provide products processed nowadays in many industrial countries to satisfy your needs.
Before any cutting is performed, the G-code needs to be generated for the cutting job. G-code is a set of machine-readable instructions that tell the machine where to move the laser cutting head. The operator can generate the instructions by hand for simple shapes. More-complex shapes require CAM (computer-aided manufacturing) software to automatically generate this G-code from a supplied CAD (computer-aided design) file. This G-code must then be sent to the machine over a Wi-Fi connection or using a USB drive.
The laser beam is generated inside the resonator. Different laser technologies use different mediums to generate the laser. However, the physics of beam generation is the same for the different laser technologies.
When an electron is stimulated by a photon it absorbs its energy to move to a higher energy state. An exact amount of energy from a photon is required to energize an electron to a specific energy state. This process is known as stimulated absorption.
The electron will decay to a lower orbital after a very short period of time. This decay is caused by small fluctuations in the quantum vacuum that cause it to fall back into a lower energy state. On decay, it will emit a photon. This process is known as spontaneous emission.
Spontaneous emission of a photon cannot be used to create a laser beam as the emitted photons will be incoherent as they move off in random directions. They will also drop down to the ground state too quickly. Lasers get around this issue by making use of materials with a metastable state. This process allows the electron to remain in a semi-excited state for longer when compared to the timescale involved with spontaneous emission (i.e. milliseconds vs. nanoseconds).
When a photon interacts with an already excited electron in its metastable state, it can cause the electron to fall back down into a lower energy orbital. When the electron does this, a photon is released with the same properties as the photon that initially perturbed it (i.e. same frequency, phase, and polarization). This process is called stimulated emission and is the mechanism used to create a laser beam. Once the process starts, it causes a cascade of photons to be released that then travel down the tube.
When the initial phase of spontaneous emission occurs, the photons will shoot off in random directions. However, some will be perpendicular to the two mirrors on either end of the laser medium. This situation creates two light waves (one traveling left and one traveling right in the medium) which creates a standing wave consisting of constructive and destructive interference. When these standing waves are produced, this is referred to as resonance. The intensity of the light increases to the point where the semi-reflective mirror will allow some light through it, generating a coherent beam of laser energy. The remaining light continues to reflect in the laser medium to continue the stimulated emission of photons. Different laser technologies produce lasers with different wavelengths.
As the beam exits the laser medium after amplification, it is directed either through a fiber optic cable (in the case of a fiber laser) or via a series of mirrors (for CO2 and Nd:YAG lasers). The beam is directed down into the sheet material through a lens that focuses the laser energy into a very small diameter to create a localized high-energy point. Note that the laser only has a single focus point of high intensity; the entire beam does not have the same cutting intensity. The difference in intensity is the reason why laser cutters are limited in the thickness of material they can cut, as the laser intensity drops off above and below the focus point.
Once the beam has been focused, it will begin to melt or vaporize the material. In the case of non-melting materials, like wood, the laser will burn through the material. With metals, the laser beam will melt the material, and a high-pressure jet of gas will blow the molten material away from the cut. The gas can either be inert nitrogen or argon or it can be oxygen which is used to accelerate the cutting process of steel.
In general, a laser cutter is designed to focus energy to a small point to vaporize or melt a material. However, the method with which this energy is delivered can differ. Listed below are some of the common forms of laser cutting:
Fusion cutting works by using a high-pressure jet of an inert gas like argon or nitrogen to blow out the molten material from the cut created by the laser beam. An inert gas is used so that it does not react with the molten metal. The inert gas also behaves as a shielding gas for the molten edge.
Not to be confused with oxy-acetylene cutting, laser flame cutting makes use of oxygen to assist with the cutting process by creating an exothermic oxidation reaction that helps reduce the laser energy requirements. The oxygen is also used to physically blow molten material from the cut. This process is also referred to as reactive laser cutting.
Remote cutting also referred to as sublimation or vaporization cutting, is used on very thin or sensitive materials. There is no gas used during cutting and the laser is typically moved using a galvo scanner that directs the laser with a series of mirrors. The laser vaporizes or ablates the material instead of gas blowing it away. Remote cutting can be extremely quick on thin material.
Thermal stress fracture cutting is a technique used to cut material by inducing stress in the base material. An example would be a method employed to cut aluminum nitride where an unfocused beam is used to melt a very thin layer of material on the surface of the part to form aluminum oxide. Aluminum oxide and the base aluminum nitride have different thermal expansion ratios and as the materials cool down at different rates, this causes a stress field that cracks the part along the laser line.
Stealth Dicing&#; is a cutting technique used to place the focal point of the laser inside a material. The laser creates a modified layer internal to the wafer (typically in the production of semiconductors). Once the wafer has been cut, it is expanded using a flexible membrane to cause cracks to propagate through the wafer to separate the individual chips that were internally cut in the material. This technique is mainly used to cut silicon wafers and is preferred to other techniques like diamond wheel cutting which produce inferior chips and require coolant during cutting.
Vector cutting is a type of laser cutting used on parts that are made up of clean lines. An example of this would be business advertisement signs. Typically the laser cuts straight through the material.
Laser rastering is the most commonly used technique when it comes to engraving an image onto the surface of a material. It works by taking a bitmap image as input and then turning that image into a set of instructions for the laser cutter which then burns the image into the base material.
When it comes to laser cutting applications there are generally three types of lasers used. CO2 lasers make use of CO2 mixed with other inert gases as the lasing medium, whereas solid-state fiber and Nd:YAG lasers make use of a crystal as the lasing medium. The operating principle of these different lasers is fundamentally the same.
A CO2 (carbon dioxide) laser consists of a tube with CO2, helium, and nitrogen gas enclosed within. Nitrogen and helium are included to increase laser efficiency. The nitrogen acts as a temporary store for energy that can then be passed on to the CO2 molecule as soon as it releases a photon. The helium, on the other hand, bleeds off any remaining energy from the CO2 molecule via kinetic energy transfer after it has released a photon, allowing it to accept energy from the nitrogen molecule.
On one end of the tube, there is a fully reflective mirror. The mirror at the other end is only partially reflective. The gas in the tube is ionized by a strong electric field which generates light by exciting the electrons in the CO2 molecules to a higher energy state, thereby generating a photon. When a photon passes near an atom in the excited state it causes that atom to release a photon. These photons then bounce off the two mirrors until there are enough collected photons to pass through the semi-reflective mirror. The temperature in the tube must be kept low for optimal efficiency; as such the tube is cooled with a low-temperature gas or liquid. In some systems, the gas is recycled to reduce running costs.
CO2 lasers have a wavelength of nm and are good, general-purpose lasers that can cut a wide range of materials as well as sheet and plate metals. However, CO2 lasers do struggle with materials with high thermal absorption and materials that are highly reflective.
Some common CO2 machines are the Glowforge® Plus for hobbyists or the Kern LaserCELLfor professional use.
Fiber lasers make use of a dosed fiber optic cable as the lasing medium. A fiber laser beam is generated by pumping photons into one end of a quartz or boron silicate glass core fiber optic filament. These photons travel along the fiber optic filament until they reach the area that has been dosed with a rare earth element. Typical elements include neodymium, yttrium, erbium, or thulium. Each of these rare earth elements will produce a laser with a different wavelength when excited by the photons. The light is then amplified by making use of fiber bragg gratings. These gratings have the same function as the reflective and semi-reflective mirrors used in Nd:YAG and CO2 lasers and reflect the light back and forth causing a cascade of photons to be generated. Once the intensity reaches a certain point, the light can pass through the grating in the form of a high-intensity coherent beam of light. Like other lasers, a fiber laser also makes use of gas to assist with blowing molten material out of the path of the laser beam or to assist with cutting.
The generally shorter wavelength of fiber lasers means higher absorption, i.e. better for reflective materials and generates less heat during cutting. This is why fiber lasers are well suited to cutting reflective materials as well as materials that are good thermal absorbers like copper or gold.
The flexibility of the fiber optic cable means that a fiber cutting head can be easily mounted to a 6-axis robot arm, for example, without the need for multiple mirrors to direct the laser as would be required for a CO2 or Nd:YAG laser. Fiber lasers have higher electrical efficiency when compared to CO2 lasers.
One of the best industrial fiber lasers is the Trumpf TruLaser Series .
An Nd:YAG laser makes use of a neodymium (Nd) doped yttrium aluminum garnet crystal (Y3Al5O12). The doping replaces some yttrium ions (+- 1 %) with Nd3+ ions. This crystal is placed between two mirrors, one fully reflective and one semi-reflective. The pumping photon source is a xenon/krypton flash tube or a series of laser diodes. In the case of Nd:YAG crystals, the pumping source supplies photons that raise the energy level of the neodymium ions. The ions then decay to release a cascade of photons that generate a coherent laser beam after being reflected between the mirrors. Once a beam of coherent high-intensity light with a frequency of nm is generated, it is directed to the cutting head using mirrors and is finally focused to a point using a lens on the cutting head. Nd:YVO lasers make use of neodymium-doped vanadate crystals (YVO4) and operate in the same way as Nd:YAG lasers. However, Nd:YVO lasers have improved power stability, do not generate as much heat, and can produce more pulses per second.
Nd:YAG lasers have better beam quality and higher power density when compared to fiber lasers, making them ideal for marking and etching. However, Nd:YAG lasers have much higher operating costs and single-digit energy efficiencies.
An example of an Nd:YAG laser cutting machine is the Finecut 300.
Laser cutters employ a versatile manufacturing technology that is used in a range of applications as listed below:
Laser cutting is a widely adopted manufacturing technology. Listed below are some of the key advantages that make laser cutters such a popular manufacturing technology:
Despite its many advantages, laser cutting still has some limitations as described below:
Are you interested in learning more about Single Table Fiber Laser Cutting Machine? Contact us today to secure an expert consultation!
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