MICRO MATERIAL PROCESSING

Laser Drilling in Industrial Use

Strategies and Applications

Laser drilling makes about 3 % of the Laser material processing market and there are many niches within this market, each with special requirements. The most important share has through hole drilling. The respective holes have diameters between 0.005 to 1.5 mm and aspect ratios (depth/diameter) from less than 1 to above 50. They have different requirements with respect to geometrical tolerances and process side effects like thermal side effects as change of metallurgy, recast, cracks, burr etc. The situation is similar for blind holes. In the following through hole drilling will be discussed.

few holes and short drilling time feeding and positioning or multiplexing becomes a challenge for system engineering while for time consuming high aspect holes efficient drilling strategies re required. When hundreds or thousands of holes are required per work piece fast beam steering or on the fly strategies are required to avoid time consuming stop and go procedures of high speed CNC systems. Figure 1 illustrates these requirements for some selected applications.

THE AUTHOR
ULRICH DRR Dr. Ulrich Drr is physicist and member of the LASAG board. He is responsible for technology and innovation. He is with LASAG since 1984 and was head of development for medical and industrial lasers and head of the laser application laboratory. In between he was 7 years Managing Director of a medical laser company.

Drilling Strategies
In todays industrial single pulse-, percussion drilling or helical drilling strategies, pulsed solid state lasers or fiber lasers with pulse duration in the range of microseconds (thermal pulses) to picoseconds (non thermal pulses) are used [1]. In conventional trepanning the same pulsed laser technologies are standard. Due to advanced new optical beam steering technologies like fast and precise galvos or ultrafast rotating optics, at least for thin material, high speed trepanning techniques are emerging using high brilliance solid state- or

Introduction
Laser drilling makes about 3 % of the Laser material processing market and there are many niches within this market each with special requirements. Applications for through holes are cooling holes, gas and fuel or liquid nozzles, lubrications holes, (micro)filters, separators, sieves, guidance etc. These holes have diameters between 0.005 to 1.5 mm and aspect ratios (depth/diameter) from less than 1 to above 50 and they have different requirements with respect to geometrical tolerances and process side effects like thermal side effects as change of metallurgy, recast, cracks, burr etc. Turbine-, powertrain-, food and non food-chemical engineering industries are the main user of such holes. The situation is similar for blind holes which are used e.g. in surface lubrication and also scribing technologies where ceramic substrates or brittle metallic parts like connecting rods or bearings have to be separated. In what follows through holes are discussed. The major task today is to combine high productivity with the increasing demand for geometrical tolerances and reduced processing side effects. The technological effort for increased productivity depends on the number of holes per work piece: for

Dr. Ulrich Drr LASAG AG C.F.L. Lohnerstrasse 24 P.O. Box 17 CH-3602 Thun Switzerland Phone: +41 33 227 45 45 Fax: +41 33 227 45 73 Website: www.lasag.com

Aspect (depth / diameter) 100 1

Quality/ geometric tolerance (%) nozzles

Surg. 10 needle nozzles

Cooling holes Lubrication holes Venting holes

Surg. needle 5 Filter Sieves

Cooling holes Lubrication holes Venting holes Filter/Sieves 10 >1000 <100 >100 >1000

1 <100 >100

Number of holes per workpiece

FIGURE 1: Market niches for through holes in dependence of the number per work piece and the geometrical and quality requirements.

2008 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim

www.laser-journal.de LTJ 57

MICRO MATERIAL PROCESSING

Hole Diameter ( m ) Steel 1000 b

100

2 fast CNC systems or the on the fly procedures are required. There are two limits for the productivity within the tolerances. These are either the average power limit of the laser or the limit in the speed to avoid oval shape of the hole exit. This speed limit depends on the pulse duration which has to be smaller than the relation laser spot/speed [6]. In thin stainless steel foils (< 0.3 mm) high frequency on the fly drilling with 100 W fiber lasers leads to high productivity of up to 5,000 holes/s [6].
c

10 Aspect

Percussion Drilling
In thermal percussion drilling the geometrical tolerances can be reduced to 5 %, with less thermal side effects or higher aspect rations. Two regimes can be distinguished in the working range diagram of Figure 3: holes where only few pulses are necessary (> 1 hole/s) and holes where many pulses are necessary and hole production time is much longer than 1 s. For this case standard stop and go CNC procedures are adequate. In case several holes can be produced within a second, on the fly percussion drilling is applied: the CNC is constantly moving to each of the holes. On each cycle one pulse is delivered and the number of cycles depend on the number of necessary percussion pulses to finish one hole. Experiments in our application laboratory have shown that efficiency is approximately 10 % lower because heat is

<10

1 1 10

100 Holes per Second

1000

10000

FIGURE 2: Productivity of single pulse drilling with thermal pulses (inserts see text).

fiber-lasers in the cw modulated mode [2] or in the pulsed mode, latter meaning that a hole is produced by a single pulse with a length depending on the depth and diameter of the hole In the following we will not elaborate on the trepanning strategies. In all thermal drilling processes the productivity has to be compromised with the quality, especially the thermal side effects like recast. In the last years new efforts have been undertaken to better understand the dynamics of the thermal drilling with its plasma creation, melt ejection, wall temperature variations and the influence of process gas etc. [3, 4]. Also experimentally the influence of pulse form and pulse modulation was investigated with respect to drilling efficiency and hole quality [5]. These investigations clearly show, that there is enough potential for improvement of thermal drilling

a coffee machine insert (b), and a separator for sugar industry (c). Typical tolerances are in the range of 510%. Note, laser drilling is not limited to round holes. Other shapes can be produced by proper optical elements in the laser beam. Compressed air (< 6 bar) is used as process gas for these applications. To achieve the productivity outlined in Figure
Hole Diameter (m)

Cr/Ni-steel 1000

Aspect Aspect 100

<30 <3

Single Pulse Drilling

With pulsed industrial Nd:YAG solid state lasers drilling lasers in the ms pulse-length regime, pulse powers up to 60 kW are available with M2 between 3 and 60 (Lasag AG), depending on hole diameter and aspect. Figure 2 shows a qualitative working range diagram giving the productivity of the mentioned lasers in dependence of aspect and hole diameter. The inserts in Figure 2 showing the productivity for a filter sample (a),

10

a b

1 < 200 0.01 holes 0.1 1 Holes per Second

10 000

- 40 000

holes

10

FIGURE 3: Productivity for percussion drilling with thermal pulses (inserts see text).

58 LTJ May 2008

No. 3

2008 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim

MICRO MATERIAL PROCESSING

Stainless Steel Pulse length 30 ns Drill time 200 ms Frequency 1500 Hz Energy 1,5 mJ Material thickness 100 m

Number of samples

Diameter m] Diameter [[m]

FIGURE 4: Quality of holes drilled with a Diode pumped QS laser.

lost during the cycle till the next shot is delivered. In stationary stop and go percussion the temperature in the hole is kept high. So it is up to the operator to determine the most efficient operation. It is clear that parts with few holes and high aspect as the vane (a) shown in Figure 3 can be drilled in the stationary percussion mode, while parts like the combustion chamber (b) with thousands of holes and small aspect are most efficiently drilled on the fly. Percussion drilling with ns laser pulses or non thermal ps laser pulses on small diameter high aspect holes lead to better hole quality and limited thermal side effects for the sake of longer processing time [7]. Figure 4 shows as an example for tolerances and reliability for a 0.025 mm hole with aspect 20 drilled in stainless steel with a diode pumped ns-QS laser. With short pulse laser and fast and precise galvos on the fly percussion drilling seems feasible without processing gas.

and the process is still in the pre industrial stage.

Summary
Single pulse and percussion drilling strategies with thermal pulses have been improved with respect to quality and productivity over the last years and there is still room for improvement by better understanding the drilling dynamics and by influencing this dynamics in modifying the timing of the input of the laser beam energy (pulse forming and modulation) and in influencing plasma and hole wall temperature with additional optical energy. Short pulse laser beams together with highly dynamic and accurate beam steering technologies offer solutions for high productivity of small holes with negligible thermal side effects. Helical drilling strategies for highest quality holes with industrial ps lasers and helical optics is still in its infant stage and need improvement of helical optics technology and average power of the ps pulsed lasers to meet the requirement with respect to industrial reliability and productivity.

[4] M. Schneider et al, Gas investigation for laser drilling, Journal of laser application, Vol. 19(3), p167 (2007) [5] P. W. French, Investigation into the influence of pulse shaping on drilling efficiency, ICALEO 06, Congress Proceeding, page 166 (2006) U. Drr, Bringt Pulsformung Vorteile beim Laserbohren, SLT2005, Conference proceedings [6] M. Baumeister, FEM modelling of high speed laser micro-perforation on the fly, Proceedings of the 4th WLT Conference, page 715 (2007) [7] T. Kaiser, Scheibenlaser zeigen Kante, Mikroproduktion 2, Seite 36 (2007) [8] Liebers et al, Helical drilling with Qswitched Nd:YAG laser, Proceedings of the 4th WLT-Conference. page 721 (2007) [9] M. Kraus, Microdrilling in steel with ultrashort laser pulses at 1064nm and 532nm, Proceedings of the 4th WLT Conference, page 639 (2007) [10]Tnnermann, Power-scaling of high power fiber lasers and amplifiers, 3rd International Workshop on Fiber Lasers Proceedings, (2007)

Roundness [%]

samples

THE COMPANY
LASAG AG Thun, Switzerland Lasag manufactures and sells worldwide pulsed laser sources, accessories for beam guiding and beam forming, processing optics and fiberoptics for material processing. A strong application laboratory offers customised laser solutions into medical-, powertrain-, tool-, electronics-,aero- and precision mechanics markets.

Helical Drilling
Helical drilling strategy is used where tolerances of < 2 % are required and thermal side effects are not tolerated like for nozzles in Diesel injectors. Because of this hard requirements the combination of ns pulsed lasers with precise helical drilling optics seems to be not suitable due to remaining thermal sides effects like recast and roughness which are above requirement from the Diesel engine engineers [8]. Efforts have been undertaken to prove the suitability of ps lasers for this application with some success [9]. But the technology

References
[1] K. Leong, Power drilling, Industrial Laser Solutions, page 11, May (2007) [2] T. Himmer et al., Cutting with Fiber Lasers, 3rd International Workshop on Fiber Lasers, Proceedings (20079 [3] R. Liebers et al, Drilling strategies for metals with pulsed lasers, ICALEO 05, Congress Proceedings (2006)

2008 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim

www.laser-journal.de LTJ 59