How does laser cleaning work?

The aim of this process is simple; to clean the surface of a material (e.g. metal) that it is working with.

So how does the process actually work? A laser beam pulsed at the surface of a material, irradiating and vaporising the layer. Until the desiringdepth of ablation has reached. The pulse’s output power and wavelength can control. It offers the user a great deal of control. When it comes to vaporising a material’s surface with a high degree of accuracy.

How does the vaporisation work? The contaminants that are on the surface layer of the material, such as the rubber or paint, absorb the beam. The heat of this beam quickly irradiates this material.

Why is this process better than more traditional methods?

A key question that we are frequently asking is “How does laser cleaning work differently to the other more traditional methods?”. There are some key problems that lasers helps to address and solve.

Firstly, other methods were contact processes.It means they are abrasive and damaging to the materials that they were working with. Take media blasting. For example, it essentially acts like a pressure washer, but with pressurise air, to blast a material until it is clean. It gets the job done, but it often affects the material that you don’t want to damage below!

Laser-based cleaning, on the other hand, is non-contact and non-abrasive. And it will only irradiate the material that you want to get rid of. This makes the process in particular, ideal for cleaning intricate and textured materials.

You also have a great deal of control over the beam, meaning you can achieve the desired depth that you want to. Further to this, you can irradiate the whole surface layer of a material, or a much thinner layer, say the topcoat of paint, but not the primer below. Or, should you wish, you can just clean a very small section. If using another process which simply blasts the material, it is hard to enjoy such a high level of control.

One of the key benefits in the way that cleaning with a laser works is that not much waste is left over due to the irradiation process; the substrate is simply vaporise rather than left as waste. The majority of the waste that is left over comes as dust particles and can be easily collected and removed by the user.

Brief introduction of fiber laser cleaning machine-Joey