Substrate Heating

Shaped light delivery for heating applications.

In wide-ranging materials processing applications, manufacturers are turning to laser systems to replace obsolete heating technologies such as hot gas, heating coils and infrared heaters.

Laser diodes offer substantially higher electrical efficiency (>60%) with an ultra-compact form factor. Heating with semiconductor laser diodes has the added benefit of highly targeting the heat within the material without residue heating.

Case Studies

Food packaging

Laser diodes are used for a variety of applications including the welding of food packaging and shrink wrapping. Leonardo’s T6 laser diode has been used as a direct diode heating source to replace a heated electrical coil element for seam welding and shrink wrapping.

These diodes allow for precision heat delivery, which prevents unwanted heating of residue materials. These highly efficient laser diodes do not create ambient heat and greatly reduce environmental and operating costs.

Leonardo's T6 water cooled laser diode

Semiconductor annealing

Laser diodes are used for rapid thermal annealing systems and other manufacturing processes that require uniform and precise energy delivery. Free-space direct diode systems offer:

Directional heat
Temperature directed control
Physical space savings
Electrical savings
Long and predictable operating lifetime

In a semiconductor environment, where downtime can cost $1M per minute, laser diodes represent a significantly reduced total operating cost.

Key Technologies

Leonardo Electronics US is capable of engineering a system that pairs our industrially rugged T6 diode with our advanced beam shaping optics. The highly customizable laser diode system offers an extremely high degree of beam uniformity, homogenization and a range of beam sizes and shapes.

Our capabilities include:

Beam collimation
Beam homogenization
Line generation
Variable working distances, depths of field
User selectable beam shapes

Tell us more about your application requirements.