Materials Processing with a High Power Laser

Sub-kilowatt CO2 lasers have been steadily gaining acceptance as tools for processing a wide variety of materials over the past few years and engineers are increasingly acknowledging their usefulness. This field of expertise can now be dramatically extended with a new, rugged 5 kW CO2 industrial laser that is recently commercially available in the UK. Such a laser offers the opportunity of designing machine tool systems, suitable for volume production work in deep penetration welding, surface alloying, transformation hardening of metals and cutting, and some aspects of this are discussed.