In recent years, laser cutting, welding, precision marking and engraving applications have been rapidly promoted, respectively forming more than 10 billion market segments. Laser manufacturing as a tool, its new functions are gradually discovered, laser cleaning is a new technology in recent years. As early as three or four years ago, it was hot for a period of time, and was hyped by individual companies, and was placed high hopes by many industry experts. However, due to reasons at the technical level and market application level, the application of laser cleaning has not been promoted and has not met the expectations of the industry. Gradually, the topic of laser cleaning was marginalized and seemed to be forgotten.

Traditional cleaning includes mechanical friction cleaning, chemical corrosion cleaning, sandblasting impact cleaning, high-frequency ultrasonic cleaning and other processes, but these are either low efficiency, or produce a lot of waste water, dust, does not meet today's national requirements for environmental protection and green production. Laser cleaning has the characteristics of no grinding, non-contact, no thermal effect, and it is easy to support dust absorption and purification equipment, which is suitable for the cleaning of various materials, and is considered to be the most reliable and effective solution.

Laser cleaning has advantages

Laser cleaning is the use of high-frequency high-energy laser pulses to irradiate the surface of the workpiece, the coating layer can instantly absorb the focused laser energy, produce shock waves, so that the surface of the oil, rust or coating instantaneous evaporation or stripping, high-speed and effective cleaning of the surface attachment or surface coating, and the laser pulse of a very short time will not harm the metal substrate under the appropriate parameters. The development of laser is an important factor to promote the laser cleaning process. At present, high frequency pulsed fiber laser and solid pulse laser are more used. Secondly, the optical components of the laser cleaning head are also very important factors.

When the laser cleaning just came out, the beam swept through the rust stains disappeared, like a broom sweeping, extremely efficient, so it is considered to be black technology. Laser cleaning can be used in a wide range, including metal steel plate, railway locomotive/rail, ship/shipbuilding, automobile manufacturing, tire mold, as well as aircraft skin, construction machinery, electronic manufacturing production line parts, petrochemical industry, mining, nuclear power, cultural relics and even armory weapons, etc., you can find direct application scenarios.

However, at that time, the laser price is high, and the stable use of lasers is mostly below 500 watts, the power is also limited, and a laser cleaning machine is more than 600,000 yuan, resulting in market applications can not be developed. We see that the disadvantage of laser cleaning is that the price is slightly higher, followed by the application of surface treatment, in the case of irregular shape workpieces, corner, dead Angle, narrow space or tube wall, etc., the beam is difficult to reach or difficult to uniformly irradiate, which will affect the play of laser cleaning.

Laser cleaning was first used in European and American countries, and the technology is more mature, but there are only a few companies engaged in it, and the market size is not large. In China, only around 2005 did relevant papers introduce this technology, and only after 2011 did a small number of laser cleaning really apply, mainly to cultural relics. In 2016, the domestic industrial laser cleaning machine batch appeared, followed by three years, the domestic laser industry set off a wave of attention to laser cleaning, and even held a number of professional laser cleaning topic conferences.

Fall silent and rise again

Domestic enterprises engaged in laser cleaning equipment are also springing up like mushrooms, engaged in more than 70 enterprises. In fact, this area of attention is very high, market sales did not break out, after the hot topic of laser cleaning, that is, silent for two years.

In 2020, after the domestic epidemic is controlled, the demand for laser equipment has increased rapidly, and the price of lasers has declined significantly again, many people have paid attention to the application of high-power cutting and welding, but at the same time, more people have consulted laser cleaning users, and some manufacturers have achieved good growth in equipment shipments. This is due to the decline in laser prices and power technology breakthroughs, from 200 watts to 2000 watts are supplied, and some domestic laser cleaning machine quotes as low as two or three hundred thousand, less than half of a few years ago. Due to the small size of its original market, even if the growth is good, it has not attracted more attention.

At present, laser cleaning has made market breakthroughs in new car manufacturing, high-speed rail wheelsets and bogies, aircraft skin removal and other fields, and ship cleaning will gradually be applied in the future. It can be predicted that laser cleaning will enter the stage of full-scale application, and the national shipments of related equipment products will usher in a period of rapid growth.

Special chillers open up more applications for laser cleaning

Each laser cleaning machine needs to be equipped with a stable and reliable laser chiller, the current market demand is mainly 200 watts to 1000 watts of fiber laser applications, laser chiller can fully meet. Guangzhou Special Domain Electromechanical Co., Ltd. is a professional R & D and production of laser chiller enterprise for more than 19 years, in the domestic laser industry cooling equipment shipments, market share ranks in the industry leader. Regardless of whether the laser is used for laser cleaning fiber laser or solid pulse laser, the CWFL series fiber laser chiller and RMFL series cabinet laser chiller can provide a full range of cooling solutions.

With the overall equipment procurement cost decline, cost-effective advantages, laser cleaning market will usher in explosive growth, special domain cooling equipment applicable and can well meet the cooling requirements of laser cleaning applications, and will cooperate with equipment manufacturers to promote laser cleaning to develop more subdivision applications.