By Ronald D. Schaeffer Laser micromanufacturing is just like traditional manufacturing except that we use photons (light!) instead of, for instance, drill bits and saw blades. Lasers are used for machining, marking, welding and surface treatment. This article provides a brief summary of how lasers are used in several exemplary situations. In conclusion, a discussion […]
Laser Editorials
Dicing of Thin Si Wafers with a Picosecond Laser Ablation Process
By Christian Fornaroli Currently, electrical semiconductor components such as LEDs, solar cells or transistors are commonly produced in a batch process. This way, many identical components can be processed in parallel on one big wafer; subsequently, each chip has to be singulated. Mechanical sawing with diamond blades has been used for a long time, but […]
Ultra-High Brightness Direct Diodes for Material Processing
By Silke Pflueger Invented two short years after the ruby laser in 1962, diode lasers are now taken for granted in many areas of our lives. You use them each time you pick up the phone, use a DVD or Blu-ray Disc, print or are at the grocery store checkout. All in all diode lasers […]
Novel Multi-Beam Processing System for Laser Additive Manufacturing
By Rahul Patwa, Hans Herfurth and Jyoti Mazumder Additive manufacturing (AM) processes (also commonly referred to as 3D printing) allows the layer-by-layer build-up of parts rather than through molding or subtractive techniques such as machining. The idea that AM machines can print 3D objects much the same way that inkjet printer creates 2D images on […]
GE Aviation Vision for Additive Manufacturing
By Todd Rockstroh GE Aviation (GEA) has launched production of their first additively manufactured engine component, the fuel nozzle for the LEAP gas turbine (Fig.1). This part will see combustion flame and gas temperatures and highly stressed thermal cycles. There are 19 per engine and the LEAP volume will require over 45,000 fuel circuits to […]