Empirical Study of Laser Cleaning of Rust, Paint, and Mill Scale from Steel Surface

Abstract

Since the last decades, the demand for laser cleaning technology has significantly increased. Laser cleaning is the process by which contaminant or impurities are removed from a material surface by using a highly energetic focalised laser beam. Typical applications of laser cleaning are paint and coating stripping, mold cleaning, and rust removal. As many industrial applications require a short processing time, it is therefore a necessity to make the laser cleaning process as efficient as possible. In this paper, we compared the performance of two types of fiber laser sources for laser cleaning: single mode and multimode. As these two types of lasers offer specific characteristics, we perform an empirical study to compare their performances in terms of cleaning speed for typical cleaning applications. Emphasis is put into the optimization of the optical parameters that maximize the cleaning speed with minimal substrate damage. Advantages and limitations of each system are also discussed.