Panasonic develops high-power Blue WBC technology
Panasonic Corporation announced it has succeeded in demonstrating the brightness blue laser. This has been achieved by using the wavelength beam combining (WBC) technology on a direct diode laser (DDL) to produce a high quality output beam.
With this technology, power scaling is enabled while maintaining the beam quality by simply increasing the number of laser sources. This demonstration opens the door to laser intensities that could be two orders of magnitude higher than conventional blue laser systems. This technology will contribute to the emerging microfabrication processes, whose demand is expected to grow in industrial applications, such as in the automotive industry.
The automotive industry is moving towards “electrification” and “miniaturisation” while requiring “high rigidity,” “design flexibility” and “productivity.” Against this background, the anticipation for the microfabrication lasers that can process various kinds of materials such as copper, gold and plastic is building up. Especially, blue laser with a high optical absorption efficiency has a high demand in the field of copper fabrication for the automotive motors and batteries. Highly-productive processing requires a laser beam source that has both high output power and high beam quality.
In order to attain such a beam source, Panasonic started collaboration with TeraDiode Inc. (TDI), a Massachusetts, U.S.-based company, in 2013, and since has been developing WBC technology which can combine multiple and different wavelengths into one combined beam. In 2014, Panasonic released LAPRISS; the laser welding robot system equipped with an infrared DDL using WBC technology. In 2017, the company acquired TDI as a wholly owned subsidiary and started developing on the output-power optimisation on WBC as well as shortening the wavelength.
The output power optimisation of the high-beam-quality blue laser (wavelength band = 400 – 450nm) was realised by combining more than 100 emitters from multiple diode bars with WBC technology.
This WBC technology combines the beams from multiple emitters at different wavelengths that are incident on the diffraction grating at angles corresponding to each wavelength. The resonator is then formed in between the shared partially-transparent mirror and each edge face of the emitters. As a result, the output beam has achieved a output of 135 W with a high beam quality of BPP 1.5mm・mrad.
Going forward, Panasonic will develop a processing system that is equipped with this laser beam source, as well as the process optimisation in laser processing.
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