CBC-GREEN

Motivation

Components made of copper material are key elements in the fabrication of energy storage systems, power electronics, control systems and required cooling structures due to very good electrical and thermal properties. However, the processing of copper with today's laser methods has its limitations due to the high degree of reflection. If brillant green lasers could be used, enabling high power and high beam quality at the same time, a significant increase in process efficiency and performance could be expected for copper laser material processing.
 

Aims and procedure

The objective of the joint project is the development and process integration of a brillant 532 nm cw laser beam source (cw: continuous wave) with high power for more flexible and efficient processing of copper materials. A process and system technology development for the fields of laser material processing, additive manufacturing, laser beam welding and cutting will be performed.
 

Innovation and future prospects

The project is pursuing the systems engineering development approach of coupling frequency-doubled Single Mode-IR laser modules by means of Coherent Beam Combining (CBC), enabling cw powers of 500 W with a wavelength of 532 nm and single-mode beam quality to be provided for laser machining processes for the first time. Innovative adapted hardware and software solutions as well as the development of adaptive beam delivery systems enable the flexible coupling of the novel beam source into different laser processing systems.