The Mystery of the Laser Parts that Failed Inspection

December 30, 2010

OphirBlog

A little while ago we got a call from a manufacturing engineer. He was in dire straits. His company had just purchased a laser to heat-treat metal parts but something was happening during the use of the laser that was causing the treated parts to fail the quality control checks afterwards. When he looked at the power meter readings and he inspected the scrap products, nothing showed up to clue him in to the problem.
Finally, after the laser manufacturers tried but failed to help him, he asked for an Ophir-Spiricon sales engineer to come see what they could do.
Using an LBA-USB-SP620 laser beam diagnostic system, the sales engineer was able to figure out the problem within minutes. The laser was being dispersed very unevenly and was creating two peaks, one of which was way too hot (the white shown in the photo). The manufacturing engineer thought he had bought a flat-head laser but the profiler was showing it to be far from flat.
Using the Ophir-Spiricon diagnostic system further, the manufacturing engineer figured out that after a short time, the laser did stabilize and so he started giving the laser a warm-up period before usage. This turned out to be a simple and cost-effective solution to the problem.
Read the full story, “Uneven laser heating causes parts to fail inspection,” written by Chuck Reagan.