Laser drilling in gas turbine blades

Drilling applications represent about 5 % of the industrial laser materials processing applications. Cooling holes in gas turbines for aircrafts as well as for power plants are one of the main applications. The improvement of productivity has led to several drilling strategies with respect to laser sources (thermal drilling and ablation drilling), the beam handling, beam distribution, and handling of the work piece, all of which contribute to the overall efficiency of the process and a high productivity. We present the successful development and implementation of a combination of laser systems with different pulse durations for drilling complex 3D geometries (see Fig. 1).