Life in the Ultrafast Lane with Fiber Lasers describes the progress being made by the industry to increase power levels of Ultrafast lasers using fiber technology. The article illustrates the superiority of Ultrafast /Ultra Short Pulse (USP) lasers for clean…
Here are contrasting differences between resonant and polygon scanners. Scan Rate vs Scan Angle A resonant scanner is designed for a fixed scan rate but the scan angle is variable. A polygon scanner is designed for…
It has been recommended that a DC power supply without a crowbar (over-voltage protection) circuit be used to run polygon scanners and polygon scan heads. The reason is that the BDC motor generates back EMF when the polygon decelerates. It…
It is common practice in low power polygon scanner systems to use the working beam to trigger a Start-Of-Scan (SOS) detector. The SOS trigger is essential for accurate laser scanning. Polygon Scan Heads, used for material processing, employ high power…
It is a fine achievement for Road Runner to push the top speed of polygon scanning to a record breaking 70,000 RPM and to solve the noise problem with a whisper quiet design! See and hear a Road Runner demonstration…
In the world of material processing, galvanometer (galvo) scanners dominate. However, with high power and ultra-fast (picosecond & femtosecond) lasers, galvos may not be fast enough. With a need for higher speed, people are looking at implementing polygon scanners which…
Polygon scanners have been used in laser printers, copy machines and other lithographic applications for more than 40 years. It is well proven that polygon scanners are capable of high speed scanning with “photographic quality” accuracy. I like the term…
A company was paying a lot for top quality German made F-Theta lenses. Less expensive lenses did not have the optical quality to meet the high accuracy in their material processing application. They found that Geomatec F-theta lenses from Japan…
When a galvanometer scanner is not fast enough, a polygon scanner may be the solution. Polygon scanners are 10 to 100 times faster than galvanometer scanners. However, polygon scanners, with their controllers, can be very bulky making it difficult to…
Laser damage to galvanometer (galvo) mirrors is a major issue in some high power applications. The galvo mirror(s) may be the weak link preventing use of higher power lasers which would allow processing material at a faster rate. This is…