PROTECTION OF THE ENVIRONMENT AND SAVING COSTS USING ELECTRONIC NOSE DURING LASER MATERIAL PROCESSING OF POLYMERS AND WOOD COMPOSITES

摘要

The protection against beam and non-beam hazardscontributes often more than 10% to the operatingcosts of laser material processing systems. Thedecomposition products of laser cut polymers (lasergeneratedair contaminants: LGACs) have beenfound to be quite hazardous [1,2,3]. Hence, for laserusers handling of emission is obligatory to assuresafe laser operation.However, the operation stability of air pollutioncontrol systems may be limited with respect tocomplex mixtures of gaseous LGACs. To use theadvantages of the activated carbon systems and toface their inherent problems, an on-line monitoringunit based on the electronic nose concept has beendeveloped and qualified in the frame of a jointresearch project. In this paper, the improvement ofthe efficiency of LGACs filtration systems is shownusing electronic nose sensing. The on-line monitoringsystem provides an acceptable compromise ofefficiency and costs (invest and running cost)compared to conventional detection technologies forvolatile organic compounds [4].