Ultrashort pulse lasers combined with advanced self-focusing technology provide the quality and process reliability required for laser glass welding in mass production.
The special and excellent properties of glass make it widely used in various scientific and technological products in different fields such as biomedicine and microelectronics.
We've previously covered the challenges it poses to manufacturers, especially in the high-volume, precision glass cutting space.
It also creates difficulties for bonding, whether it's welding individual glass parts together or soldering glass to other materials such as metals and semiconductors.
Become one. All traditional glass welding methods struggle to provide the precision, weld quality, and production speed required for cost-effective mass production.
For example, bonding is an economical method, but it leaves adhesive residue on the part and even requires degassing.
Dielectric welding involves placing a powder material at the point of contact and then melting it to complete the bonding.
Whether this melting is achieved by an oven or a laser, a large amount of heat is pumped into the part.
This is a problem faced by microelectronics and many devices.
Ionic bonding is an ingenious method that provides extremely high bond strength.
Two new, very flat glass surfaces are pressed together and truly fused together by molecular bonds.
However, it is not practical to do so in a production environment.
Laser glass welding.
Well, laser welded glass has many very useful properties, such as extremely high melting point, transparency, brittleness, and mechanical rigidity, but it also brings many difficulties to laser welding.
Therefore, typical industrial lasers and methods for welding metals and other materials are not suitable for glass.
As with precision glass cutting, the secret lies in the use of infrared wavelength ultrashort pulse (USP) lasers.
The glass is transparent under infrared, so the focused laser beam can pass directly through it until the focused beam narrows and becomes concentrated enough to trigger "nonlinear absorption".
This "nonlinear absorption" only occurs in ultrashort pulse lasers with high peak power, and the same cannot be done with other types of lasers.
As a result, in a small area around the focal point of the laser beam (usually less than a few tens of microns in diameter), the glass absorbs the laser light and melts rapidly.
This focused beam scans along the desired welding path to complete the weld, just like other forms of laser welding.