EdgeWave started the development of industrial-suited >1000W fs-lasers on the 1rst march of 2012. The project is being supported by the BMBF as a part of its funding initiative „Ultrakurzlaser für hochpräzise Bearbeitung“ and as part of the collaborative project „Femtosekundenlaser höchster Leistung (FOKUS)“. The collaborative project will be coordinated by EdgeWave, while the controlling agency is the VDI-TZ from Düsseldorf.
The focus of the project is the implementation of a reliable, compact and and cost effective and industrial suited fs-laser with an average power of >1000W and a pulse duration in the range from 200fs to 1ps. For the processing of materials – e.g. fiber-reinforced plastics for lightweight designs – the beam sources of the aimed-at power class will enable a significant decrease in processing time.
Lately ultra-short-pulsed laser technology has become more and more economical not only in micro machining but also in macro machining of materials while in the medical sector ultra-short-pulsed lasers enable entirely new therapeutic approaches such as highly precise cuts of the eye with minimal damage. The fundamental feature of these laser beams are their extremely high peak intensities with low pulse energy enabling highly precise ablation processes and processing of temperature sensitive materials without causing thermal damage. In the production of LEDs or computer chips the yield per wafer will increase and in one of the most performed surigcal operations, the therapy of cataracts, new significantly more efficient and cheaper methods will be implementable. Those new therapeutical methods for age-related longsightedness will be rivaling the classical reading glasses in near future.