Next Generation Blue Laser Technology Enables Better Metals Processing
The NUBURU BL-1000 is a 1 kW, high brightness, blue laser that offers scanner compatibility to address multiple mass-market metal joining applications.
Posted: June 23, 2023
NUBURU, Inc. (“NUBURU” or the “Company”) (NYSE American: BURU), a leading innovator in high-power and high-brightness industrial blue laser technology, recently announced the new NUBURU BL-1000-F, the first 1 kW blue laser to offer high enough brightness to work effectively with high-speed 2D galvo scanning heads. This makes it ideally suited for applications in the mass production of batteries and consumer electronics which involve joining thin (<1 mm) metals, including copper, aluminum, and even dissimilar metal combinations. In particular, the NUBURU BL-1000-F can produce high speed, micron-scale conduction welds with the precision, quality and process stability required when producing millions of products.
The NUBURU BL-1000-F achieves this by harnessing the intrinsically higher absorption of metals to blue light, together with 1 kW of output power in a high brightness beam. This allows the BL-1000-F to weld and process metals that are highly reflective for IR lasers – including copper, aluminum, gold as well as other metals such as steel, nickel, and stainless steel – at increased speeds with no spatter and low to no defect welding. For example, the NUBURU BL-1000-F can weld two 100 µm thick copper foils at speeds >350 mm/s (21 m/min) spatter free and with low to no defects.
This improvement in beam quality means the laser beam can be delivered to the work piece using a high-speed scanning system. This allows the rapid redirection of the laser beam as well as weld speeds not obtainable with gantry style systems. The flexibility of a scanner enables wobbling the blue laser beam to improve the weld quality when welding crack-susceptible materials such as aluminum in a battery. These capabilities enable the NUBURU laser to better address the needs of battery manufacturers, cell phone manufacturers and electronic component manufacturers.
Another critical advantage of the NUBURU blue laser technology is superior reliability because of its all-semiconductor laser construction. This eliminates the limited lifetime and stability issues of lasers that rely on non-linear processes for frequency conversion to generate green laser output.
The NUBURU BL-1000 delivers 1kW through a scanner offering metal weld efficiency gains of 8X for copper due to the absorption advantages of blue compared to the near infrared wavelength of fiber lasers. By reducing the excess heat input by ~10x the BL-1000 can eliminate typical production challenges of metal distortion, molten spatter, and weld gaps, increasing the yields in mass production and enabling the highest currently possible mechanical and electrical performance.
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