From fs – ns: Influence of the pulse duration onto the material removal rate and machining quality for metals Available to Purchase

When high requirements concerning machining quality are demanded, ultra short laser pulses from a few 100fs to 10ps may be the tool of choice. For these pulses it is known that the removal rate and machining quality slightly increases with shorter pulse duration. But as cost-effectiveness is also a key factor for a successful transfer of a technology to industrial applications, these systems compete against more cost effective systems with pulse durations from several 10ps to a few ns. It was found in previous work that the removal rate for metals strongly decreases if the pulse duration is raised from 10ps to 50ps. In contrast to this dramatic drop new experiments show that the impact is much weaker for a further increase to several 100 ps and that the removal rate even increases when the pulse duration is further raised into the ns-regime. A systematic study of the removal rate and the machining quality for this longer pulse durations will be presented and the results will be pulled together with the previous ones for pulse durations of several 100fs to 50ps. Further it will be shown how operating factors from the laser system itself may influence its own applicability.