Scan path strategy for laser processing of fragmented geometries

Abstract A new scan path strategy is presented to reduce the duration of laser processing of geometries consisting of scattered, unconnected processing areas of a small size. We refer to these as fragmented geometries. The novelty of this strategy is to first identify optimized parallel scan lines for the overall shape using the Radon transform, which provides information about the most productive scan line orientations. The lines are then chopped into mark and jump vectors exploiting fast laser power modulation to precisely process the fragmented structure. An experimental study was conducted with a galvanometer scanner and a set of exemplary geometries comparing the proposed strategy with conventional raster scanning and a fill strategy. The results show a reduction in processing time with the new algorithm of up to 57% depending on the geometry. This finding indicates, that the new strategy is a promising approach for improvement of productivity for areal laser processing applications.