Application of laser cutting technology in glass

Glass is an important industrial material. It has a long history in China for thousands of years. It not only enriches our life world, but also promotes the development of civil society. At present, glass has been applied in many industries of the national economy, such as the automotive industry, construction industry, medical, display, electronic products like small optical filters as small as a few microns, glass substrates for notebook flat panel displays, and the automotive industry. And large-sized glass sheets used in large-scale manufacturing fields such as construction. There are many kinds of glass. One of the common glass is soda-lime glass, also known as alkaline glass. It is mainly used in the automotive industry, construction industry and household appliances. Another is called borosilicate glass or non-alkaline glass and mainly used in the field of flat panel displays and electronic products.

Glass is a relatively transparent solid material that forms a continuous network structure upon melting, and gradually increases in viscosity during cooling and hardens and crystallizes silicate-based non-metallic materials. The remarkable feature of glass is hard and brittle, which brings great difficulties to processing. Today, the quality requirements for glass products are getting higher and higher, and more precise and meticulous processing results must be achieved. The traditional method of glass processing is mechanical knife cutting. However, mechanical knife cutting has the disadvantages of low efficiency, poor effect, and is fragile, easy to passivate, and damaged and replaced. It is difficult to achieve the requirements of no micro cracking and edge quality, so there is an urgent need for technological innovation in glass cutting. There is a new glass processing method in the industry, laser cutting.

Nowadays, with the improvement of the laser technology, laser can realize more and more functions, such as precision drilling, fine cutting, selective material removal, etc., and more new applications, new concepts are being proposed and practiced and imported industrial production. Laser is an ideal tool for micro-precision machining of various materials. It has no direct force on the workpiece and is not easy to damage the product. So it has the advantages like with the good cutting quality, and no emissions, waste, environmental protection and so on. 

Laser cutting machine adopts a focused high-power-density laser beam to illuminate the workpiece, causing the irradiated material to rapidly melt, vaporize, ablate, or reach a flash point. At the same time, the molten material is blown off by a high-speed airflow coaxial with the beam, thereby cutting the workpiece. Laser cutting is one of the hot cutting methods. There is no contact between the torch and the workpiece during laser cutting, and there is no wear of the tool. Besides that the laser cutting process has the advantage of low noise, low vibration and no pollution.

There are two methods for laser glass cutting: one is the melt cutting, which adopts the glass to have good plasticity and ductility at softening temperature, and is irradiated to the softened glass surface with a focused CO2 laser or ultraviolet laser. The higher energy density causes the glass to melt, and then the molten glass is blown away by the air stream to create a groove, thereby achieving melt cutting of the glass. The second is the crack control method, which is a commonly used laser cutting method. Firstly, laser heating the surface of the glass, the higher energy will cause the temperature of the surface to rise sharply, and the surface will generate a large compressive stress, but which will not cause the glass to rupture; then the region is sharply cooling, generally using cooling gas or coolant, a sharp temperature drop will cause a large temperature gradient and a large tensile stress on the glass surface, which will cause the glass surface to begin to rupture along the direction of the predetermined scribe line to achieve glass Cutting.

Now the cutting glass processing technology generally adopts CO2 lasers. Choose the right laser, considering factors such as wavelength, output power, beam mode, flexibility, cost, reliability, and whether it is conducive to system integration. Oree laser has decades of experience in laser production and can produce more than 3,000 laser cutting machines per year. The products are exported to more than 80 countries and regions around Asia, Europe and Africa. Widely praised by the majority of users and peers.

Professional Laser Cutting Machine Manufacturer - OreeLaser