In nearly every sector of industrial manufacturing a broad spectrum of surface processing techniques is used, e.g. for structuring, coating or polishing of aesthetical or functional surfaces.In many applications these laser based surface processing techniques already achieve highest precision and quality, but often the throughput is limiting the industrial capability.
The idea of ultraSURFACE is to increase the throughput for laser surface processing by at least a factor of 10 without any drawbacks in the quality of the processing results by using sophisticated optics for specific laser beam manipulation. Two different optics concepts will be realized and combined with fast and synchronized mechanics, scanner and optics control.
Optics Concept 1 refers to a dynamic and flexible beam-shaping approach with piezo-deformable mirrors which enables the realization and the fast adaption of application specific intensity distributions.
Optics Concept 2 is a beam-splitting approach which allows simultaneous processing with multiple laser beams and thus a significant increase in throughput. For both concepts the implementation of prototypes is planned as well as their industrial validation in different fields of application (laser structuring, laser polishing, laser thin-film processing).