An ideal metal fabrication equipment can bring you more than high profits. In recent years, fiber laser cutter has become increasingly popular in metal processing. We know that fiber laser is kind of ideal lasers that achieve all the requirements of small size, high efficiency, high reliability, high beam quality and high output by amplifying light of specific wavelengths in the fiber. What exactly is that? Let’s take a look together.
What is fiber laser?
fiber laser cutter
Optical fiber is usually a glass solid fiber drawn from SiO2 as the matrix material, which is widely used in optical fiber communications. The principle of light guiding is the mechanism of total internal reflection of light. That is, when the light is incident from the light-dense medium with a large refractive index to an optically sparser medium with a small refractive index at an angle greater than the critical angle, total reflection will occur, and the incident light will all be reflected to the light-dense medium with a large refractive index, and the refractive index is small.
Fiber can be divided into single-mode fiber and multi-mode fiber. Single-mode fiber has a small core diameter and can transmit only one mode of light, with small inter-mode dispersion. The core diameter of multi-mode fiber is thick, which can transmit multiple modes of light, but the dispersion between modes is relatively large.
The transmission mode of the fiber laser is to use the fiber to conduct laser beam. Generally speaking, the principle is to wrap a layer of YAG crystal in the inner and outer circles of the optical fiber, so that the light source can illuminate the YAG crystal from the optical fiber to generate laser, and at the same time, repeated refraction conduction is carried out in the optical fiber.
The working principle of fiber laser is mainly based on its special structure. The laser is composed of three parts: working material, pump source and resonator. And the specific functions are as follows:
1. The gain fiber is the gain medium that generates photons.
2. The pumping light acts as an external energy to make the gain medium achieve population inversion, that is, the pump source.
3. The optical resonator is composed of two mirrors, and the role is to make the photon feedback and amplification in the working medium.
What the differences among fiber laser, CO2 laser and YAG solid-state laser?
Are you still not sure which kind of laser cutter is right for you? Do you think that the fiber laser cutting machine is too expensive, but the effects of CO2 laser or YAG laser cutting always fail to meet your expectations? Hopefully the below will help you understand better.
Fiber laser belongs to solid-state laser. It generates a laser beam with a seed laser, which is then amplified in a specially designed glass fiber to provide energy through a pump diode. The fiber laser has a wavelength of 1.064 microns, which can produce very small focal spot diameter. The intensity is more than 100 times that of a CO2 laser device with the same average power. And also, fiber laser has an exceptionally long service life of at least 25,000 laser processing man-hours.
CO2 laser is a gas laser based on a carbon dioxide gas mixture excited by electrical discharge. It has a wavelength of 10.6 microns and is mainly suitable for processing non-metallic materials and most plastics. CO2 laser has relatively high efficiency and have excellent beam quality. Therefore, it is one of the most widely used laser devices.
YAG laser is also a kind of solid-state laser, named after the doped element neodymium and carrier crystal, which has a wavelength of 1.064 microns, the same wavelength as fiber laser, making it suitable for marking metals and plastics. Unlike fiber laser, this type of laser devices include relatively expensive pump diodes, which are consumables. It must be replaced after about 8,000 to 15,000 machining hours. Compared to fiber laser, YAG laser has a shorter lifetime and is more suitable for metal and coated metal.
Here are some specific parameter comparisons.
What can fiber laser cutting machine?
As mentioned above, the wavelength of CO2 laser and solid-state laser such as YAG or fiber laser determines that the former is more easily absorbed by non-metals, and can cut non-metallic materials such as wood, acrylic, PP, organic glass, etc. with high quality, while the latter is not easily absorbed by non-metals. Moreover, the wavelengths of the two differ by an order of magnitude, which greatly increases the flexibility of fiber laser processing.