In the past few years, the applications of laser cutting, laser welding, laser marking and laser engraving have been quickly promoted and each segment market has gained the value of more than 10 billion RMB. Laser is a manufacturing tool whose new functions are gradually being discovered. And laser cleaning is one of the new functions. Three or four years ago, laser cleaning became quite heated and many industrial experts had high expectation towards it. However, because of technical issue and market application issue at that time, laser cleaning didn’t meet those expectation and seemed to be forgot as time goes by......
Traditional cleaning includes mechanical friction cleaning, chemical cleaning, high frequency and ultrasonic cleaning. However, these kinds of cleaning methods are either with low efficiency or bad to the environment, as they will generate a big amount of waste water or dust. On the contrary, laser cleaning doesn’t produce those kinds of pollutants and is non-contact without heat effect. It is applicable to clean various kinds of materials and is considered as the most reliable and most effective way of cleaning.
The advantages of laser cleaningLaser cleaning uses high frequency and how energy laser pulse on the surface of the work piece. The surface of the work piece will then absorb the focused energy to form an impact wave so that the oil, rust or coating will instantly evaporate to realize the cleaning purpose. Since the laser pulse only lasts for a very short time, it won’t damage the foundation of the material. The development of laser source is an important factor that promotes the laser cleaning technique. For the time being, the most frequently used laser source is high frequency fiber laser and solid state pulsed laser. In addition to laser source, the optical components of the laser cleaning head also plays an important role.
When laser cleaning technique was first invented, people considered it as “the amazing cleaning technology”, for everywhere the laser light scans, the dust will disappear instantly. Laser cleaning machine has a wide variety of applications, including metal plates, shipbuilding, automobile, molding, engineering mechanics, electronics, mining or even weapon.
However, laser source was quite expensive at that time and power range was limited to below 500W. This made a laser cleaning machine cost more than 600000RMB, so large application couldn’t be achieved.
Laser cleaning was first researched in the European countries and its technology was quite mature. However, there were only a few enterprises in this field, so the market scale wasn’t big. For our country, articles which introduced this technique didn’t come out until 2005 and a few laser cleaning applications appeared after 2011 and mainly focused on historical relic. In 2016, domestic laser cleaning machine began to appear in batch and in the following 3 years, the domestic laser industry began to pay the attention to laser cleaning technique again.
Rise after silenceThe number of domestic enterprises that deal in laser cleaning device continues to increase and now the number could be more than 70.
As the demand of laser equipment increases, the price of laser sources begins to decrease. And there are more and more people consulting the laser cleaning machine. Some laser cleaning machine manufacturers have experienced a big growth in the business. This results from the lower price and the breakthrough in the laser cleaning machine power. There are laser cleaning machines from 200W to 2000W provided. The domestic laser cleaning machine can be lower than 200000-300000 RMB.
For the time being, laser cleaning has made market-oriented breakthrough in new automobile manufacturing, high speed train wheel set and bogie, aircraft skin and ship cleaning. With this trend, it is expected that laser cleaning technique will enter the stage of large-scale application.
Every laser cleaning machine needs to be equipped with a reliable recirculating laser chiller. The current market demand include 200-1000W fiber laser cleaning machine and S&A Teyu recirculating laser chiller can totally meet the demand. No matter whether the laser cleaning machine uses fiber laser or solid-state pulsed laser, S&A Teyu CWFL and RMFL series dual circuit recirculating chiller can provide efficient cooling for it. Find out the detailed models of dual circuit recirculating chillers at https://www.teyuchiller.com/fiber-laser-chillers_c2
