Laser processing relies on the interaction between the thermal energy of the beam radiation and the materials, which can realize the effects of instant vaporization, splitting, melting or modification between the materials, and can meet the needs of people, it's called laser manufacturing or laser processing. Now laser processing in our country quickly spread, and has penetrated into hundreds of industries on the production line. Laser processing has proved to be the easiest and most suitable for the application of metal materials, rough statistics in the current global laser processing applications, metal processing accounted for more than 85% of the proportion. However, at present, in metal processing, to ordinary steel material processing occupies the majority, steel material application is undoubtedly the largest, especially stainless steel, alloy steel has been used in all aspects of life. Yet lasers are rarely used in other metals, such as copper, aluminum and Non-ferrous metal, the first building blocks of many industrial products, it has excellent conductivity, heat transfer, corrosion resistance and wear resistance. Aluminum Alloy has high strength and is a good material to realize light weight, but this paper focuses on copper material. 1. Copper laser cutting and welding copper has been a valuable metal materials, especially this year since the international commodity futures steel, plastic, copper, aluminum, cardboard and other prices have risen a lot. Common Copper materials are pure copper, brass, copper and other kinds of materials, including rod, wire, plate, strip, strip, tube, foil and so on. In fact, copper is an ancient metal, modern unearthed many precious thousands of years ago bronze, so the copper material technology, processing quality improvement, is a very important work. Laser processing of copper materials will be a very promising option.

The three shapes of copper plate, copper sheet and copper tube should be the most suitable for laser cutting, but copper is a highly reflective material, and in ancient times copper sheet was used as a mirror, which has a low absorption of laser beam, in many cases less than 30% , equivalent to 70% of the laser is reflected, not only resulting in energy loss and waste, but also easy to cause processing head, lenses, lasers and other parts of damage. Therefore in the past for a long time copper laser cutting is a big challenge. CO2 laser cutting machine can cut thick materials, can also cut copper, but must be coated in a layer of graphite spray agent or magnesium oxide to prevent reflection and damage equipment. The absorption of copper to fiber laser beam is very low, but manufacturers have made isolators in product structure design, the first nLight introduced anti-high anti-material fiber laser, later, the Chinese science and Technology Guanghui, Feibo and other manufacturers have launched anti-high anti-fiber laser. Some companies do cutting head processing head also made anti-reflective design, which makes fiber laser in copper cutting applications opened the market. Now the use of 3KW cutting thickness of 10 mm copper plate has already been achieved. Laser welding of copper is harder than cutting it. Welding requires the melting of the substrate, usually resulting in higher power or longer duration of light return than cutting. The absorption of copper increases with the decrease of the wavelength, which means that the visible band laser (for example, the green laser with 532nm wavelength) will have a significant advantage in copper welding, but the green laser is subject to power limitations. Foreign Tongkuai has achieved kilowatt-level green laser, and domestic enterprises only reached the highest one-hundred-watt level, the gap is obvious. The appearance of the swinging joint makes the fiber laser suitable for the copper material welding. The power, application and maturity of the fiber laser ensure the copper material welding. Thousands of Watts of fiber lasers allow more room for copper welding applications. In the past two years, the appearance of the Blue Light semi-conductor laser in China is also good for copper welding. The wavelength of the Blue Light laser is about 400-460 nm, and the absorption rate by copper material can reach 70% , today a blue laser of perhaps 1.5 kw is more than enough. 2. Copper material is widely used, will drive laser processing demand copper is a very good conductive material, so in power, cable, motor, switch, printed circuit board, capacitors, communication devices, telecommunications base station and so on have a large number of applications. Copper has a good thermal conductivity, in heat exchangers, refrigeration equipment, household appliances, pipes and other applications. In addition, copper is widely used in battery industry, especially in recent years, laser welding technology has been used in battery packaging and power battery cell gradually. Copper is most widely used and used in electric and electronic industry, accounting for more than half of the total consumption. With the development of laser technology and the use of laser processing in copper related parts, it is estimated that laser processing of copper will bring more than ten billion yuan of equipment demand for laser equipment in the future, become a new growth point of laser industry.

Source: Web Collation