Figure 1 The fiber laser is beginning to make its mark in sheet
metal fabrication.
By Tim Heston, Senior Editor
asers unleash the power of nature’s light packet, the
photon. To make a laser, you basically energize, or
And it just so happens that Carlo Dal Medico, sales
and production manager for the Italian contract manufacturer Pres Metal S.p.A., works with one of the latest iterations of the technology in the metal fabrication arena.
Last year Dal Medico’s company became an early adopter
of a fiber laser sheet metal cutting system.
L
Small Spot, Big Opportunity
Midway between Milan and Venice, on the outskirts of
the farming hamlet of Veronella, Pres Metal was
launched in 1979 and has grown to specialize in thin
sheet metal parts. Fiber laser technology has allowed the
shop to cut a range of materials, including highly reflective ones such as aluminum, copper, and brass, all of
which happen to make up a lot of Pres Metal’s bread-and-butter work: electrical enclosures, oven components, and the like. Dal Medico explained that the fiber
laser has allowed the company to take more orders in
sectors where it had previously had only a limited presence or none at all.
He held up one component with a pattern of extremely
small holes. “This is, for example, the case of a drilling ap-
plication in the agricultural sector, where the reduction in
kerf width achieved using a fiber laser means that we can
make very small holes, which has allowed us to accept an
order that we would otherwise have had to refuse.”
Last year the shop bought Salvagnini’s L1Xe- 30 sheet
metal cutting system, with a 2-k W fiber laser from IPG
Photonics (see Figure 1). From a distance it looks similar
to a conventional cutting laser, but there are important
differences. It has a tinted glass enclosure designed specif-
ically for fiber laser applications. The chiller is small, as is
the laser power source. From that comes a laser capable
of cutting mild steel from 0.028 to 0.40 inch thick without
changing the lens in the focusing head, according to Dal
Medico. Only a nozzle changeout is required.
As Steve Aleshin, applications manager at Salvagnini
America, explained, “There is no need to change lenses
when switching between material thicknesses, as the fiber
laser’s small spot size allows for high-speed cutting even
with the use of long-focal-length lenses.”
And it cuts fast, especially on thin sheet. On 20-gauge
mild steel, it travels twice as fast as a 4-k W CO2 laser.
Overall, the machine can cut steel up to 0.709 in. thick,
stainless to 0.394 in. thick, aluminum to 0.315 in., and
copper and brass (yes—copper and brass) to 0.197 in.
The Road to Fiber
In metal fabrication, no laser has penetrated the market as
deeply as the CO2 gas variety. To produce a laser, CO2
molecules are pumped as they collide with nitrogen molecules,
reflecting back and forth inside the resonator. Think of the
CO2 molecule as an elastic band, with oxygen atoms on the
sides and one carbon atom in the center. Every time this
band is stretched or deformed in a certain way, it produces
a photon. Duplicate this action continuously, billions of
times over, and you get a powerful laser, these days powerful enough to cut thick plate.
