Advances in industrial high-power lasers

Four major types of laser sources are used for material processing. Excluding Excimer lasers, this paper focuses on advances in High Power CO2 lasers, Solid State Lasers and Diode Lasers. Because of their unrivaled cost to brightness relationship the fast axial flow CO2 laser remains unrivaled for flat-sheet laser cutting. Adding approximately a kW of output power ever four years, this laser type has been propelling the entire sheet metal fabrication industry for the last two decades. Very robust, diffusion cooled annular discharge CO2 lasers with 2kW output power have enabled robot mounted lasers for 3D applications. Solid State Lasers are chosen mainly because of the option of fiber delivery. Industrial applications still rely on lamp-pumped Nd:YAG lasers with guaranteed output powers of 4.5 kW at the workpiece. The introduction of the diode pumped Thin Disc Laser 4.5 kW laser enables new applications such as the Programmable Focus Optics. Pumping the Thin Disc Laser requires highly reliable High Power Diode Lasers. The necessary reliability can only be achieved in a modern, automated semiconductor manufacturing facility. For Diode Lasers, electro-optical efficiencies above 65% are as important as the passivation of the facets to avoid Burn-In power degradation.