Rapid development of laser manufacturing
Laser technique as a material processing tool is quite popular in industry sector and has great potential. By 2020, the domestic laser product market scale has already reached nearly 100 billion RMB, accounting for more than 1/3 share of the global market.
From laser marking leather, plastic bottle and button to laser metal cutting & welding, laser technique has been used in industries that are related to people’s daily life, including metal processing, electronics manufacturing, home appliance, automobile, battery, aerospace, shipbuilding, plastic processing, art craft, etc. Even so, laser manufacturing has been facing a bottleneck problem - its segment markets only include metal processing, electronics manufacturing, battery, product packaging, advertising and so on. The current laser industry needs to think about how to explore more segment markets and realize scale application.
High-end application requires high precision
Since 2014, fiber laser cutting technique has been applied in large scale and gradually replacing traditional metal cutting and some CNC cutting. Fiber laser marking and welding techniques also witnesses a rapid growth. Nowadays, fiber laser processing has taken up more than 60% of the industrial laser application. This trend also promotes the demand of fiber laser, cooling device, processing head, optics and other core components. Generally speaking, laser manufacturing can be divided into laser macro-machining and laser micro-machining. Laser macro-machining refers to high power laser application and belongs to rough machining, including general metal processing, aerospace parts manufacturing, car body processing, advertising sign making and so on. These kinds of application requires not so high precision. Laser micro-machining, on the other hand, requires high precision processing and is often used in laser drilling/ micro-welding silicon wafer, glass, ceramics, PCB, thin film, etc.
Limited to the high cost of the laser source and its parts, the market of laser micro-machining hasn’t been fully developed. Since 2016, domestic ultrafast laser processing has begun scale applications in products like smart phones and the laser is used for fingerprint module, camera slide, OLED glass, internal antenna processing. The domestic ultrafast laser industry is developing fast. By 2019, there have been more than 20 enterprises in the development and production of picosecond laser and femtosecond laser. Although high-end ultrafast laser is still dominated by European countries, domestic ultrafast lasers have already become quite stable. In the coming years, laser micro-machining will become the most potential area and high precision processing will become the standard of some of the industries. That means ultrafast lasers will have more demand in PCB processing, photovoltaic cell PERC grooving, screen cutting and so on.
S&A Teyu launched ultrafast laser chiller
Domestic picosecond laser and femtosecond laser are developing towards the trend of high power. In the past, the major differences between domestic ultrafast laser and the foreign one are stability and reliability. Therefore, a precise cooling device is very crucial to the stability of the ultrafast laser. Domestic laser cooling technique has been developing rapidly, from the original ±1°C, to ±0.5°C and later ±0.2°C, the stability is getting higher and higher and meets the need of most of the laser manufacturing. However, as the laser power is getting higher and higher, the temperature stability is hard to maintain. Therefore, developing ultra-high precision laser cooling system has become a challenge in the laser industry.
But luckily, there is one domestic company that had this breakthrough. In 2020, S&A Teyu launched CWUP-20 laser cooling unit which is specifically designed for cooling ultrafast lasers like picosecond laser, femtosecond laser and nanosecond laser. This closed loop laser chiller features ±0.1℃ temperature stability and compact design and is applicable in many different applications.
Since ultrafast laser is commonly used in high precision processing, the higher the stability the better in terms of the cooling system. In fact, the laser cooling technique featuring ±0.1℃ stability is quite scarce in our country and used to be dominated by countries like Japan, European countries, United States and so on. But now, the successful development of CWUP-20 broke this dominance and can better serve the domestic ultrafast laser market. Find out more about this ultrafast laser chiller at https://www.chillermanual.net/ultra-precise-small-water-chiller-cwup-20-for-20w-solid-state-ultrafast-laser_p242.html
