Systems engineering for laser heat treatment

Manufacturing technologies are successful when they are flexible, simple and reliable. Laser processes have the challenge of high investment costs and they require expert handling and high demands on the system safety as well. The core components of the system are the laser and NC ma-chine. Furthermore the essential system parts for a successful hardening process are the housing, beam shaping modules and the temperature controller. In modern machine concepts all modules are connected by field bus interfaces and are controllable by a main PLC. For aspects of safety a laser and robot enclosure built according to standards and guidelines is crucial. For the monitoring of safety interfaces according to current standards, safety-related controls and components have to be designed, calculated, validated and documented. For the effective use of an expensive laser machine the combination of laser hardening and cladding processes is increasingly requested. At Fraunhofer IWS Dresden, laser heat treatment is used and has been continuously developed for many years. The complete system design and construction comes, on request, from a single source to minimize the risk and assembling time. The state of the systems engineering for laser heat treatment will be demonstrated by different machine concepts and application examples.