Creare, who’d won an SBIR to develop a laser system that could join ribbons in carbon fiber for aerospace, turned to Lasertel for its expertise in designing lasers.
The existing system, with an indiscriminate heat source, lacked the necessary directional control to precisely process the material. In the initial retrofit design, the customer tried an off-the-shelf fiber coupled laser diode, but this design resulted in a heating head that could not meet size constraints.
Lasertel’s T6 fluid cooled laser diode arrays, in a scalable building block format of 5 bars precisely spaced for even distribution of optical power over the work surface, delivered more power per square cm, to get the beam profile where they needed it, at a significantly reduced head size.
Lasertel's T6 water cooled laser diode
This custom configuration proved to be highly effective in carbon composite joining. Replacing a heat coil or gas jet with Lasertel free-space direct diodes resulted in:
The Integrated Laser-Assisted Consolidation System integrates with a Fives Machining Systems VIPER-6000 Fiber Placement System
Illustration of a laser-assisted consolidation approach for prepreg composites