Ultraviolet Lasers Are Increasingly Used In The Processing Of Brittle Materials

Laser manufacturing technology is based on the physical interaction between the high energy of the laser and the material, and the material is vaporized, ablated, modified, etc. to achieve the material processing effect. Nowadays, laser processing has rapidly entered all walks of life, and it is still dominated by metal material processing, accounting for more than 80% of the entire laser processing application. Because metals such as iron, copper, aluminum and corresponding alloys are hard materials, they have a better effect on laser, so it is easy to apply laser processing. For some common metal laser cutting and welding applications, you may only need to know the corresponding optical power, and the research requirements for processing are actually not very strict.

But in fact, a lot of non-metallic materials are used in life and high-end manufacturing fields, such as soft materials, thermoplastic materials, heat-sensitive materials, ceramic materials, semiconductor materials, and brittle materials such as glass. If these materials are to be processed by laser, the requirements for beam properties, ablation degree, and material damage control are very strict, and it is often required to achieve ultra-fine processing, even at the micro-nano level. It is often difficult to achieve the effect with common infrared lasers, and ultraviolet lasers are a very suitable choice.

UV laser technology is versatile

Ultraviolet laser refers to the light whose output beam is in the ultraviolet spectrum and invisible to the naked eye. At present, the common industrial ultraviolet lasers include solid crystal ultraviolet lasers and gas ultraviolet lasers. The ultraviolet laser output can be obtained by frequency-tripling the infrared all-solid-state laser, and the wavelength is mostly 355nm. At present, the pulse width has been successfully developed from nanoseconds to picoseconds. Excimer lasers are commonly used in gas ultraviolet lasers, which can be mainly used in ophthalmic surgery and chip lithography. In recent years, fiber lasers have gradually developed products in the ultraviolet band, and picosecond ultraviolet fiber lasers are the most representative.

Since ultraviolet lasers lose a lot of heat during frequency doubling conversion, and the cost is still high, it is still difficult to make higher power at present. Ultraviolet laser is often considered as a cold light source, so ultraviolet laser processing is also called cold processing, which is very suitable for processing brittle materials.
Common brittle materials processing with UV laser

Glass is a material that is widely used in daily life. From water cups, wine glasses, containers to glass ornaments, it is often a difficult problem to make patterns on glass. Traditional processing often results in high glass damage rates. Ultraviolet lasers are very suitable for glass surfaces. Marking, pattern production, and can achieve ultra-fine production. Ultraviolet laser marking makes up for the shortcomings of low processing precision, difficult drawing, damage to the workpiece, and environmental pollution. With its unique processing advantages, it has become the new favorite of glass product processing, and has been listed as a must for various wine glasses, craft gifts and other industries. Processing tools.
Ceramic materials are widely used in buildings, utensils, decorations, etc., but in fact ceramics are also used in many electronic product devices. The ceramic ferrule, ceramic substrate, ceramic package base, ceramic cover of the fingerprint identification system, etc. are used. The production of these ceramic components is becoming more and more refined, and the use of ultraviolet laser cutting is an ideal choice at present. Ultraviolet lasers have very high processing precision for some ceramic sheets, will not cause ceramic fragmentation, and do not require secondary grinding for one-time forming, and will be used more in the future.

UV laser wafer cutting: The surface of the sapphire substrate is hard, it is difficult to cut it with a general cutter wheel, and it wears a lot, the yield is low, and the cutting line is larger than 30 μm, which not only reduces the use area, but also reduces the output of the product. Driven by the blue and white LED industry, the demand for sapphire substrate wafer cutting has increased significantly, which puts forward higher requirements for improving productivity and finished product pass rate. Ultraviolet laser cutting wafers can achieve high-precision cutting, smooth cuts, and greatly improved yield.

Quartz cutting has always been an industrial problem. The most commonly used traditional processing method is “diamond stone saw blade”, that is, it is processed by “head-to-head”. Quartz is very brittle and difficult to process, and diamond saw blades are consumables.

The ultraviolet laser has an ultra-high precision of ±0.02mm, which can fully guarantee the precise cutting requirements. When facing quartz cutting, precise control of power can make the cutting surface very smooth, and the speed is much faster than manual processing. The parameters can be displayed in full numbers, and different parameters can be precisely adjusted through the computer, which is more intuitive and accurate, and the difficulty of getting started is much lower than that of manual cutting.