Precision micro drilling with copper vapor lasers

摘要

The authors have developed a copper vapor laser based micro machining system using advanced beam quality control and precision wavefront tilting technologies. Micro drilling has been demonstrated through percussion drilling and trepanning using this system. With a 30 W copper vapor laser running at multi-kHz pulse repetition frequency, straight parallel holes with size varying from 500 microns to less than 25 microns and with aspect ratio up to 1:40 have been consistently drilled on a variety of metals with good quality. For precision trepanned holes, the hole-to-hole size variation is typically within 1% of its diameter. Hole entrance and exit are both well defined with dimension error less than a few microns. Materialography of sectioned holes shows little (sub-micron scale) recast layer and heat affected zone with surface roughness within 1--2 microns.