“Fiber lasers have low running costs because they consume little electricity, are easy to maintain, and do not require laser gas. Application is now spreading into the field of thick plate.

Fiber lasers are solid state lasers just as YAG lasers are. Using fibers themselves as the medium, the beam is transmitted while being efficiently amplified. This becomes a highly efficient beam transmission with no waste, and with a high power density. While the oscillation efficiency of the carbon dioxide gas laser is about 15%, for the fiber laser it is quite high at 25-30%. It can get by with a small chiller and electrical consumption can be held down to about half. In addition, no laser gas and virtually no maintenance are required. There are also no gas related consumables. Looking at overall running costs reveals that they can be reduced by 70-80%, this being the greatest advantage.

The beam can be concentrated at one point, and the laser cutting quality of the laser cutting which can do precision finishing is top notch. Amada, Mitsubishi, and Trumpf which handle thin plate cutting are already marketing fiber laser cutting equipment. The target of the cutting equipment which Komatsu Industries has recently put on sale is also thin plate cutting. The presumption is that the users will be those producing cans and sheet metal companies. The speed is fast, but in the case of fiber, it does seem that there is considerable advantage when cutting thin plate. There is the danger that the laser light can be harmful to the crystalline lens of the eye, leading to blindness. The laser light must therefore be so contrived that it does not leak out. Due to the scale of the thin plate, there is the advantage that the entire cutting machine can be covered so that it can easily be operated safely.

The view is that the advantages can be fully utilized even in the field of medium and thick plate, so that the thick plate companies have become actively engaged in development here. In the spring of 2010, Kohtaki Precision Machine Company worked together with Hypertherm which manufactures plasma power sources and produced a prototype. Following this in 2011 Nissan TANAKA and Koike Sanso Kogyo commercialized a product.

In the field of thick plate where capital investment has cooled off, there have been signs now of a recovery in investment, and it appears that the effort put by companies into development might well bear fruit. Where will the users see any attraction here? It seems that this year might become Year One for fiber lasers.”