Let's Discover the Behind the Scenes of Laser Cutters

Laser cutters help you produce products with high standards of precision. They are accurate and capable of providing you detailed and complex cuts. Overall, they provide you the freedom to design your products the way you want. You can cut materials using these machines according to your designs. And 99.9% of the time there are no chances of error.

These are fully automated and saves a lot of your production time. As your worker just needs to move materials, it leads to low material wastage with lower production costs. They can also provide laser engraving services to develop your projects and find a solution for your production. You can produce different depths and dimensions of your projects.

Let’s find out how.

The Working

It is a digital manufacturing technology, working on 2D vector files. The laser cutter has a laser resonator that depends on the cutting method, containing a mixture of a crystal body or glass fibers. When there is a force of energy applied to the mixture of the cutting process, the force sends the beam through different mirror lenses which focus on the laser.

The laser beam travels through the nozzle straight at the material. When it contacts the surface, it vaporizes the material in the shape of the vector file. There is a part of the material which melts with the laser, that is Kerf.

Basically, the laser beam is a column of very high-intensity light of a single wavelength or color. For a typical CO2 laser, its wavelength is in the infra-red part of the light spectrum. Hence, it is invisible to the human eye. The beam is about ¾ of an inch in diameter. It travels from the laser resonator that creates the beam on the machine’s beam path. These rays may bounce in different directions by several mirrors, or beam benders before they focus onto the plate. The focused beam will go through the bore of a nozzle right before it hits the plate. Also passing through that nozzle bore is a compressed gas like Oxygen or Nitrogen.

You can focus the laser beam by a special lens, or a curved mirror that takes place in the laser cutting head. It should focus on the spot of the laser material. The focus spot and density of the energy on it should be perfectly round, consistent, and centered in the nozzle. Just like when you use a magnifying glass to focus the sun’s rays onto a leaf, and that soon catches fire. Now when you think about when you focus 6KWatts of energy into a single spot, it can get extremely hot. The laser cutters containing Mazak parts or Bystronic parts can easily handle these high wattages for the best results.

This high-powered density can cause rapid heating, melting, and partial or complete vaporizing of the material. When you are cutting mild steel, the heat of the laser beam is enough to create an "oxy-fuel" burning process, and the laser gas will be pure oxygen, resembling an oxy-fuel torch. When you cut stainless steel or aluminum, the laser beam melts the material. The high-pressure nitrogen is the main component to blow the molten metal out of the kerf.

With a CNC laser cutter, laser cutting head can move over the metal plate in the shape of the desired part. Hence, it cuts the part out of the plate. A capacitive height control system can maintain an accurate distance between the end of the nozzle and the plate being cut. The cut can be affected by raising or lowering the focal point from just above the surface of the plate.

Other than these, many other parameters that work and affect quality. But when you control them properly, laser cutting gives a stable, reliable, and accurate cutting process.

The Endless Opportunities that come with it

You can make the most of this technology in various industries using high-quality laser cutters with Mazak parts and Bystronic parts. Whether it is a mechanical engineering, a technical firm or a creative space. For example, you can combine 3D printing and laser cutting. And after that, you get perfect for production needs and highly customized products.

Alternative Parts, Inc. is the manufacturer and distributor of replacement parts for Amada Machinery.