Jul 29 2010
JDSU, a supplier of optical products for service providers, announced that it has teamed up with Amada to produce a 4 kW fiber laser. The laser will be fused in a sheet metal cutting system which offers the swiftest linear cutting speed, and will be sold in the Japanese market from May 2011 by Amada.
The high-power fiber laser will be able to slice through materials such as titanium, brass and copper that cannot be sliced properly with conventional CO2 lasers. When Amada’s high-speed sheet metal cutting system is integrated with the fiber laser, thin sheets of aluminum and stainless steel can be incised at 2.5 to 3 times quicker than CO2 based severing devices.
Fiber lasers provide various advantages over CO2 lasers for sheet metal process applications that includes less maintenance costs, decreased footprint, the potential to focus from a long distance and consume very less power and pliant beam delivery via a process fiber.
The VP of JDSU, Ken Lo, stated that the company’s fiber laser technology combined with the manufacturing expertise of Amada’s machine tool design helped in designing a cost-efficient and highly reliable fiber laser.