MultiFlex

  This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 825201.  

Title

Ultrashort Pulsed Laser Processing at 1 Kilowatt Using a Flexible Multi Beam Approach

Concept

The overall objective of the MultiFlex project is to open a market within the European manufacturing sector for high speed Ultra-Short Pulse (USP) processing using kilowatt average laser power and individually modulated multi-beams.

At present Ultra-Short-Pulse-processes are cost-effective only for some specific industrial applications. With commercial available USP-laser-sources and scanning systems contradictory demands regarding precision, flexibility and throughput are often not satisfied simultaneously. Either the available beam power is too small to achieve the desired and necessary throughput, or - in most cases - the high power cannot be applied for achieving high precision high quality processing. The MultiFlex project will overcome this obstacle and pave the way for a widespread, cost-effective application of USP-lasers in industrial manufacturing.

The basic idea behind MultiFlex is to setup a high power “USP laser-dot-matrix-printer”, which consists of a newly developed high power ultrashort pulsed laser with an output power of more than 1 kilowatt and a flexible multi beam optics concept.  

Participants

• Fraunhofer Gesellschaft zur Förderung der angewandten Forschung e.V., Germany (Coordinator)
• Amplitude Systèmes SA, France
• Laser Engineering Applications SA, Belgium
• A.A, France
• Lasea, France