Latest advances in high power disk lasers

Abstract

While the Disk laser concept was invented in the early 90s, the first industrial products were available in the beginning of this decade. Since then, the disk laser is used in mass production and serves a large variety of application fields. The output power per disk has continually increased and reached a level of 2.5 kW per disk in 2007. As of today, the disk principle has not reached any fundamental limit regarding output power per disk or beam quality, and offers many advantages over other high power resonator architectures. In early 2009 TRUMPF released a new series of industrial disk lasers. This series is based on an output power of 4 kW per disk. Scalability of output power is achieved by serial coupling of several disks without influencing the beam quality of the system, with output powers of up to 16 kW at work piece. The new TruDisk laser series has incorporated several advancements compared to older generation disk lasers, which have allowed a considerable reduction of running cost, investment cost and footprint. This paper will explain important details of the TruDisk laser series and process relevant features of the system, like pump diode arrangement, resonator design and integrated beam guidance. In addition, advances in applications in the thick sheet area and very cost efficient high productivity applications like remote welding, remote cutting and cutting of thin sheets will be discussed.