Investigations on clean and efficient remote cutting and ablating processes

Remote processes with brilliant continuous wave lasers enable highly efficient laser processes. When cutting and abrading metal or composite materials, a large amount of particles and emissions arise. In general the emissions will be exhausted. But a high amount of substances contaminates the treated part as well as the laser machine equipment and is a high health risk for the machine operator. Based on this challenge, scientific investigations were done during laser structuring with high power fiber lasers. The generated particles and emissions were evaluated and classified. To minimize the part decontaminations new air knife - cross jet solutions were tested and optimized using gas and particle flow simulations. The results of this work support the user of remote processes in guaranteeing the health and environmental regulations.