consulting in laser material processing the path less travelled non-mainstream laser applications...

Consulting in Laser Material Processing

The Path Less Travelled

Non-mainstream laser applications

ICALEO 2014


Laser Processing is a multi-billion dollar market:

ILS estimates 2014 industrial market at 2.5 billion1

Most of this comes from well-established applications:

Metal cuttingMarkingDrillingWelding

1 Industrial Laser Solutions vol. 26 no. 1, pp 6-9

What’s “non-mainstream”?

But then there’s the other stuff


Well, how are you going to kill rats in a cornfield with lasers?


How big a laser do you need?Range?Power?Duration?Steering?Safety?


For months I was afraid they were going to send me samples


But now people are picking on something smaller

© Intellectual Ventures


There’s real money behind this

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is exploring ways to eradicate malaria

Eliminating mosquitoes from inhabited areas is an effective control method

Intellectual Ventures, run by Nathan Myhrvold, is working on ways to do this using scientists who worked on SDI


How would you kill mosquitoes with a laser?

TrackingSet up a “fence” with LED’s, a retroreflector and a cameraProcess the silhouette to determine if it’s a mosquito

SizeSpeedWingbeat frequency

KillingWavelength

Should be eye-safe (1.5 μm range)Beam size

As small as possible over the target area (1mm?)Energy

Need about 50 mJ in 5 ms (tests by Intellectual Ventures)


So they came up with this

© Intellectual Ventures


Which sort of works


Working with food

MarkingBar codesLogos

ModifyingTrimmingThinningAltering


Drilling grains of rice


Why would you want to do this?

Reduces cooking time by allowing water to reach the kernel


But you don’t want to drill rice grains one at a time

CO2 laser

150 μm spot

30 μs pulse

10 mJ

3 kHz


Works well, never implemented

100 μm depth

1 mm spacing


Cosmic Debris


Cosmic Debris

These canperforate spacecraft

These candamage spacecraft

There’s lots of stuff orbiting the Earth

800 active satellites

29,000 objects larger than 10 cm



200,000,000 objects larger than 1 mm


I know what we can do;

let’s blow them out of the sky with lasers!

Where do you get big enough lasers to do that?

You don’t; you just use lasers big enough to push them around


www.clean-space.eu


But you still need a pretty big ground-based laser

Laser Requirements from Clean Space

Laser Wavelength : between 1 and 1.1 μmPulse width : 10 nsEnergy : 10 to 50 kJ/pulseRepetition rate : > 10 HzBeam quality : M2~3Beam pointing stability : 70 nradTelescope Diameter : 4 to 6 mTransmission : 80% Total tracking accuracy : 100 nradStrehl ratio : 0.8


In San Diego, the frost is not on the pumpkin yet


This process is labor-intensive and dangerous due to the use of big sharp knives

Almost all Jack-o’-lanterns are manually generated


We have studied ways of automating this process

CO2 laser

400 watts

400 μm spot

10 mm Rayleigh range

4 mm/sec

Cycle time 217 sec.


Edge quality and cut straightness is good

Wall thickness ~40 mm


Happy Halloween

Leonard Migliore

consulting in laser material processing the path less travelled non-mainstream laser applications...

Documents