Laser technology as a core of industrial manufacturing driving force, itself is constantly moving forward. To sum up, the laser is toward the “faster, higher, better, shorter” in the four directions.
Higher: the power of the laser is getting higher and higher, the average power has more than 10 million watts. In 2013, the first commercial 100,000-watt fiber laser was installed at the NADEX Center in Nagoya, Japan for the welding of 300mm thick steel plates. Laser cutting applications are also toward a higher power development, laser pointer cutting machine power continues to rise, has reached 8 ~ 12kW.
Better: the beam quality of the laser output is getting better and better, the fiber quality of the fiber laser has reached 100,000 watts of single-mode. In the past year, fiber lasers, disc lasers, direct semiconductor lasers have a significant increase in brightness.
Shorter: the output wavelength of the laser covers a shorter band, and the short wavelength laser has been widely used. Many advanced manufacturing processes require cold processing, such as in the manufacture of smart phones, often need to use short wavelength, short pulse UV laser to deal with. Short wavelength lasers have been widely used in surface marking, semiconductor wafer processing, drilling, cutting and other fields.
Faster: pulse laser faster, ultrafast laser has achieved rapid development, already with a simpler structure, more convenient operation, lower cost and more stable performance, walked out of the laboratory and into industrial applications.
What are the new application growth points in the future market, which has always been a topic of concern.
Laser cleaning: with the enhancement of environmental awareness, a variety of environmental cleaning technology came into being, laser cleaning technology is one of them.
Laser cleaning uses the high energy laser beam to interact with the material to be removed on the workpiece surface, instantaneous evaporation or peeling, without a variety of chemical cleaning agent, green pollution-free. It can be used to remove paint, oil pollution, oxidation layer, cleaning screw, rust removing, cleaning welding seam and so on.
Laser cleaning has a huge market space in microelectronics, architecture, nuclear power station, automobile manufacturing, medical treatment, cultural relic protection, steel rust removing and mould decontamination, automobile manufacturing, building and other fields.
Metal 3D printing Market: metal 3D printing, that is, additive manufacturing, usually using selective laser cladding (SLM) technology, the use of laser energy to melt metal powder layer by layer, and ultimately make the desired shape.
In 2016, the SLM system sold more than 1000 units, of which the main laser sources were fiber laser, disc laser, /CO2 laser and femtosecond fiber green laser pointer, and the power range was 30W to 1kW. The precision of 3D printing is also getting higher and higher, and the resolution of printing fine structure has reached micron level.
Lidar: laser radar market will grow steadily in the next five years, the main driving force of market growth is from unmanned aerial vehicles, automatic driving vehicles, robots, military and security fields.
Laser lighting: part of the laser lighting market is automotive laser lighting, mainly automotive headlights. Another part of the market is safe laser lighting, such as providing a warning sign for people riding in the night environment.