Compensation of scanner based inertia for laser structuring processes

Laser surface structuring is an innovative manufacturing technology as it offers high flexibility with regard to a range of materials. The technology itself is based on material ablation caused by the energy transfer of pulsed laser radiation into heat. In order to deflect the pulsed laser beam on the workpiece surface, usually, a scanner system with two moveable mirrors is used. The mirrors are moved by high dynamic galvanometers. However, because of the inertia of the mirrors, the ablation is not evenly distributed along a marking path which is defined by a vector movement. The distribution density of the single laser pulses is higher in the areas of mirror acceleration as compared to the area of constant velocity. A new and innovative strategy has been developed at the Fraunhofer IPT to automatically analyze the behavior of the scanner system as well as to compensate the acceleration regions adapted to the used processing strategy and the machine system.