Diverse Industrial Uses
Lasers are used for welding, cutting and brazing in the automotive industries. In defence they are used to pump other kinds of lasers to raise their energy levels.
Tuesday 01 Oct 2013 @ 12:10
Innovate UK
Innovate UK
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Scotland has the edge with PowerPhotonic lasers
The discoveries of a small Fife company are set to revolutionise manufacturing techniques all over the world.
High powered industrial lasers now have a sharper cutting edge thanks to lenses made in Scotland that focus their light into brighter beams - and the repercussions will be far-reaching.
With sustained support from the Technology Strategy Board, Fife company PowerPhotonic has perfected novel techniques for mass producing tiny lenses that get all the individual beams coming from a laser pointing in the right direction.
‘We supply the micro-optics needed to focus and shape high power laser beams,' explained Roy McBride, Managing Director of PowerPhotonic.
'We use pure silica glass made smooth by polishing with lasers, which is formed into complex structures that sometimes have hundreds of lenses. The approach is something like making spectacles for humans, except that you make about 500 little lenses on one piece of glass,' said Roy.
They are also employed in medical applications and industries such as printing.
‘The key thing is to get beams as bright as possible and as focused as possible. High power diode lasers (HPDLs) are super-efficient at converting electricity into laser light power but the beam is composed of multiple lower powered beams that do not always point in the same direction,' he added.
‘This restricts their usefulness in an increasingly demanding market. Industrial processing like cutting, drilling or welding involves extensive use of lasers to ensure precision and accuracy, but the beams are not bright enough to deal with the challenges of high performance manufacturing.'
For three years, Roy worked on developing a high tech range of lenses designed to improve the performance of industrial lasers. It was a period spent refining the manufacturing process and the design tools. The company also patented a sensor to measure the qualities of the laser beams it was aiming to correct.
Now Roy and his co-founders - Professors Howard Baker and Denis Hall of Heriot Watt University's Institute of Photonics and Quantum Sciences - are on the brink of an international breakthrough.
Technology Strategy Board's key role
The Technology Strategy Board has played a key role in building PowerPhotonic. First through a 2006 project called Lasers in Manufacturing, Healthcare and Security (LAMPS), which helped PowerPhotonic prove its ideas and then through a more recent competition called High Efficiency Laser Processing Systems (HELPSYS) which involved teaming up with Heriot Watt, Cranfield University and the project leader, GSI Group.
‘I find the Technology Strategy Board great to work with. They are more interested in a good result from a project than following a process. In our case there was a genuine interest by the project managers in making our projects successful,' said Roy.
‘We were able to focus on what we wanted to achieve. When things changed along the way, the Technology Strategy Board took that into account. They were sensible and pragmatic in the way they managed the projects we have been involved in.
Click here for the full success story and further information.
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