Taking the Dirty Work out of Cleaning
Whether its for preparing a surface or removing rust from a molding tool, the traditional approach is to use abrasives or chemical solutions or a combination of both.
By their very nature, these methods can be damaging and expensive. They can affect the mechanical properties of the cleaned piece or create a drain on resources in terms of the cost of consumables and operator time.
In addition, abrasives and chemicals are messy to use, often unhygienic and environmentally unsound in terms of the excess water used or dust created.
Cleaner cleaning
Using pulsed laser radiation, laser cleaning provides gentle, precise cleaning. Organic layers or oxides can be removed and surfaces prepared for subsequent contact or bonding with no need for any chemicals whatsoever.
Virtually any organic or non-organic surface can be cleaned including ceramics, stone and wood as well as metal.
Unlike other surface preparation processes, there’s no need for time consuming masking of areas not to be processed – laser cleaning works precisely where cleaning is needed.
How fast a laser can clean depends on the material, the coating itself and how much laser power is applied. Typical laser cleaning systems work with 100W to 2kW average laser power and can give cleaning speeds of between 10cm² per second up to 100cm² per second. In other words, today’s most powerful laser cleaning systems can clean several square meters a minute!
Manual or smart
Our product partner, 4JET are pioneers of laser cleaning technology.
4JET’s JETLASER series of flexible, handheld laser systems provide fully portable solutions o industrial cleaning tasks.
JETLASER systems only require an electric power supply. Operators can be trained within one day and the company’s training centre in Germany, onsite or remotely.
The cleaning laser beam is emitted from an ergonomic handheld end-effector. That allows CE compliant two-hand usage. The award winning sleek and lightweight design provides comfortable operation over hours; without any damage to substrates, use of consumables or any excess dirt or waste.
JETLASER can be entirely manual or incorporated with a robot interface for automated processing.
For more details of JETLASER and 4JET’s SCANYWHERE robot-based laser systems, please contact sales@tlm-laser.com