With the development of new material processing technology, various plastic products are widely used in ships, automobiles, medical devices, aviation, food packaging, daily chemicals and other fields due to their light weight, corrosion resistance, good insulation, and excellent molding and processing performance. The medical device and food packaging industries have extremely high requirements for welding efficiency and quality, requiring green environmental protection, good water tightness, good air tightness, sterility, dust-free, and transparency. In terms of fusing plastic parts, laser welding machines are a very ideal choice and are leading the new market for transparent plastic laser welding applications.
The average efficiency of plastic laser welding is 2~3 times higher than that of traditional welding shock wave welding process, and the process advantages are very obvious. The absorption rate of 1710nm wavelength laser in transparent/white plastic is several to 10 times higher than that of laser with shorter wavelength, which can firmly weld transparent plastic parts together, making it more flexible to use and more beautiful to weld. The new 1710nm semiconductor laser only takes a dozen seconds to complete a complex plastic welding process. Traditional plastic welding is much slower.
Transparent/white plastics have a strong absorption rate for 1710nm lasers. From the figure below, it can be analyzed that the absorption rate of transparent plastics for 1710nm lasers is better than that of 2μm fiber lasers. In addition, the output optical power of 1710nm lasers does not need to be at least 100W like 808nm and 980nm. Generally, only tens of watts of optical power are needed to meet most applications. The reduction in power means that the laser is lower in cost, smaller in size, and more practical.
The 1710nm direct semiconductor laser solution saves up to 10 times more energy than solid lasers or CO2 lasers, and more than 30% more energy than fiber lasers.
The laser wavelength of a semiconductor laser is determined by the compound semiconductor material it uses. Some laser manufacturers focus on the research and development and production of semiconductors in the two major material systems of gallium arsenide and indium phosphide, with a high level of technology. Some semiconductor lasers made of indium phosphide materials can cover the wavelength range of 900-2000nm. Based on the market demand for transparent/white material welding, manufacturers have developed 1710nm semiconductor lasers based on indium phosphide materials and successfully developed 1710nm high-power semiconductor laser diode single-tube chips.
The fiber-coupled module of the new product has been aged for more than 6000 hours under 25℃ test conditions. From the aging power change curve, it can be seen that the module output power has not decreased significantly, and the reliability is very high.