Industrial high precision applications with ultrashort pulse thin disk lasers

Femtosecond-pulsed thin disk lasers are known for excellent beam quality combined with high peak powers and pulse energies and are therefore predestinated for a range of micromachining applications like cutting or drilling. New and upcoming applications of micromachining are really challenging for mechanical tools or even longer pulsed or continuous wave laser sources. We present a recent overview of such sophisticated high precision applications in fields like medical device, automotive, and electronics manufacturing. The applications are performed on different galvanometer and trepanning scanner systems with femtosecond disk laser sources of up to 16 W average power, up to 100 µJ pulse energy, and 500 to 600 femtoseconds pulse width. Included are high speed cutting of polylactide material for novel bio-resorbable medical stents, high speed scribing of genuine leather for automotive applications; high speed drilling of injection nozzles; cutting of copper micro parts with near 0° taper angle; and others. These exemplary applications illustrate the increasing need for highly economical process technologies for the manufacturing of micro-scale features. Femtosecond disk lasers provide very high peak powers of hundreds of megawatt, thus giving additional freedom for micromachining by combining very small heat affected zones, high quality results and highly productive ablation rates. A particular strength of femtosecond-pulsed laser micromachining is that it is maintaining, instead of impairing, the special mechanical, electrical, or biological properties of high-tech materials.