Objective
In the proposal, schemes for the adaptation of excimer laser processing, technology for plastics and flexible material industries will be examined; in order to promote the introduction of high power excimer laser technology in industries dealing with flexible materials.
High quality results have been achieved in all tested polyvinyl chloride (PVC) materials when cutting by excimer laser. A suitable choice of laser parameters and control of laser beam shape and power regimes can always be found, in which good quality results can be obtained. Because of the pulsed nature of excimer lasers and the requirement to operate on the workpiece with low average power and low pulse energy, it is necessary to configure the beam in a series of line foci. Because of this limitation, cutting of non straight lines is economically not possible. Cost analyses indicate that straight line cutting by excimer laser of thick PVC materials costs 6-10 times more than conventional methods. Macro and micro hole drilling tests on thick PVC materials have shown excellent quality holes can be generated, but at rather slow rates. A new laser microdrilling technology has been developed, following the micro hole drilling work. In this case, moving webs of thin films, appropriate for the packaging industry, can be multiply drilled on the fly with a large number of small holes.
Excimer laser cut quality of polythene/polypropylene material was excellent. The best cut quality was obtained by using the argon fluoride (193 nm) excimer laser, while in all the cases (krypton fluoride and xenon chloride excimer laser) the cut quality was much superior than the conventional cutting quality.
Laser cutting is a very flexible procedure, can be computer controlled. The use of this technology minimises the material losses. Low excimer laser fluences are required. The cutting speed is very low for industrial use. The use of multicutting head systems increases the processing speed. The cost of the excimer laser cutting process of complex shapes is higher than the conventional one, mainly due to the high cost of the equipment. The straight line cutting procedure can be very fast, equivalent to the conventional one. The cost of the excimer laser straight cutting of the specific material seems to be lower or of the same order of magnitude as the cost of the conventional methods.
The major exploitable results are:
single shot laser drilling of holes in thin polymer films at high speed and high density;
production of high resolution microscopic marks on high speed moving materials for security or coding purposes.
The research programme's tasks are :
- to assess the feasibility of using high power excimer lasers such as PVC and polyethylene : non-woven combination.
- to determine specific technical; economic and quality advantages of using excimer laser for flexible material processing compared to conventional machining techniques.
- to build prototype excimer laser based workstations for automated cutting and drilling of the above mentioned materials.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- natural sciences chemical sciences inorganic chemistry noble gases
- engineering and technology mechanical engineering manufacturing engineering subtractive manufacturing
- natural sciences chemical sciences polymer sciences
- engineering and technology materials engineering coating and films
- natural sciences physical sciences optics laser physics
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Coordinator
14234 ATHENS
Greece
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