In recent years, million-watt lasers have become the standard products in the field of industrial lasers, and the popularity of million watt lasers has greatly improved the efficiency and capability boundaries of industrial processing. However, with the influx of a large number of manufacturers into the Wanwa circuit, homogenization competition has also plunged this market into the Red Sea of "price wars". This environment has also allowed the growth of China's fiber laser market to fall into a quasi-stagnation situation of "seemingly rising non-rising".
The attempt to break the homogeneity of fiber laser
In order to break this market dilemma, many enterprises began to seek differentiated competition routes. At present, the three most obvious routes for fiber lasers are high power, high brightness and miniaturization.
High power is the main theme of fiber laser development in the past few years... With the popularity of 10,000 watts of lasers, 30,000 watts, 40,000 watts, 50,000 watts have entered the metal processing market. For the laser itself, the core difficulty lies in the power tolerance and long-term stability of the device. For practical applications, the lack of stable and reliable supporting parts is the biggest obstacle to its development.
High brightness is actually the basic property of the regression laser, by improving the energy density per unit area, to achieve the effect of high brightness and low power instead of high power, while in the field of high inverse material processing, advanced manufacturing has obvious advantages, its core difficulty is the mode instability, nonlinear effect control.
Miniaturization is a key to open a new world of laser applications - smaller size, lighter weight, higher integration, subvert the past understanding of laser processing, and gave birth to portable laser tools such as handheld laser welding, handheld laser cleaning, greatly promoting the development of laser applications.
History of miniaturization of million watt laser
Because the fiber laser can achieve power improvement through module superposition and beam combination, the overall volume of the fiber laser is also increasing during the process of power improvement. In 2017, 6kW fiber lasers with multiple 2kW modules entered the industrial market. In the following year or two, 8kW, 12kW, 15kW, and 20kW lasers were introduced one after another, but even 20kW lasers were combined on the basis of 2kW or 3kW, which resulted in a huge volume of finished products. Although the performance has been improved, the excessive volume also brings greater trouble to the user's transportation and assembly. With the demand for 10,000 watts becoming increasingly obvious, laser manufacturers began to think about how to reduce the size of the machine.
In the early stage, the main idea is to increase the power of a single laser module, gradually increase the past 3kW to 4kW, 5kW, and reduce the volume by reducing the number of beam combining modules of 10,000-watt lasers. However, at this stage, the sudden decrease in the number of modules and the sudden increase in the power of a single module pose a great challenge to the stability of the laser cores.
When the above challenges are gradually overcome, another major advantage of single-module lasers begins to appear - without a single-module laser that combines the beam, the beam quality is greatly improved, and the performance of multi-mode lasers is significantly improved in thin plate processing, precision manufacturing and other fields. As a result, high-power single-module lasers began to become independent products for integration with laser equipment.
At this stage, domestic laser manufacturers have carried out a lot of optimization and improvement for the application scenarios and optical characteristics of single-module lasers. After several years of effort, the single module 12kW laser came out. Compared with the multi-mode 12KW laser, the single-module 12kW laser volume is reduced by about 60%, the weight is reduced by about 40%, and the processing capacity on some materials is comparable to 15kW. It can be said that the core idea of this stage is to replace the multi-mode beam laser with a smaller single-module laser in some application scenarios.
It can be said that this subversive size reduction has a huge impact on the downstream, the most obvious is the handheld laser welding market. The early handheld laser welding machine was equipped with a chiller, an old 1000W single-module laser, and the cabinet volume reached 1.05 m3 (equivalent to the volume of an old washing machine). With the outbreak of the market in recent years and the requirements of users for portable, smaller and more portable have become the consistent pursuit of handheld welding manufacturers. After the subversive "bone reduction" lightning series laser, it is possible to install two hand-held welding machines in a trunk.
For sheet metal processing users, this new form of drawer design allows the laser to be shipped with the complete set of equipment, truly achieve the disassembly and use, and let the user say "goodbye" to the traditional and covers the laser air conditioning room, but also save more than 30% equipment installation time.
Another focus of concern is that the cost of shipping in 2022 has risen sharply, pushing up the cost of shipping for exporters. A large reduction in the volume of lasers means that the number of lasers that can be loaded in the same container increases significantly, and it also means that the number of containers required for the same number of lasers is reduced, which can save a lot of freight for enterprises. In particular, overseas agents can also gain a greater competitive advantage because of the reduction of logistics costs.
Xi'an Guosheng Laser Technology Co., Ltd. is a high-tech enterprise specializing in R&D, manufacturing and sales of automatic laser cladding machine, high-speed laser cladding machine, laser quenching machine, laser welding machine and laser 3D printing equipment. Our products are cost-effective and sold domestically and abroad. If you're interested in our products, please contact us at bob@gshenglaser.com.