LIMO showing a new short-time tempering technology to heat various glass coating layers.
At Glasstec 2014, LIMO Lissotschenko Mikrooptik GmbH, the laser and beam shaping specialist from Dortmund, is showing a new short-time tempering technology to heat and and activate wafer-thin glass coating layers gently, quickly and with a high level of precision.
Within fractions of a second, coating layers need to be heated to over 1000 degrees Celsius in order to activate their functions (such as solar protection or photovoltaic materials). These surfaces are often thinner than human hair (from 0.1 to more than 100 micrometres) and contain miniscule particles and molecules that need to cool down only tenths of a second after they have reached their refinement temperature to keep their desired properties and structural sizes. Additionally, glass is a carrier material that can be weakened or destroyed through improper warming and cooling.
“Glass is a fragile material. Processing the surface is a great challenge that can only be solved through very selective and extremely fast heating and cooling,” said engineer and LIMO’s Director of Thin-Film Activation, Dirk Hauschild. The solution is an in-line high-temperature process that can heat large areas of extremely thin functional layers in milliseconds with great precision. This is done by the Activation Line 300, the most powerful LIMO Line Laser.
LIMO developed this system to serve as a system supplement to conventional oven and lamp tempering. Developed especially for continuous operation, the laser has an intensive and uniform output ideally suited for reliable 24/7 industrial surface tempering. As an added advantage, due to low heat capacity, coating layers cool off quickly.
Patented LIMO beam shaping stabilizes the parameters of the process, guaranteeing uniform large-area processing. “Thanks to the line beam profile, the user is able to evenly temper large surfaces without changing the characteristics of the substrate material,” Hauschild explained. “The Activation Line 300 makes it possible to have custom-made processes with 100% closed surfaces.”
Unlike standard point-laser processing, the system also allows for tiny energy and process areas that were not addressable until now. This innovative technology has a versatility allowing for use in short-term tempering (modifying surfaces and coatings through extremely fast heating and cooling), rapid thermal annealing (repairing crystals and activating dopants) as well as selective tempering (targeted heating of absorbing coatings).
Mr. Hauschild has issued an invitation to interested parties from the glass industry: “Visit us at Glasstec, which takes place in Düsseldorf at the end of October 2014 and let us get together to talk about your challenges and how our Activation Line 300 laser source can help to solve them.”
Get more information at the LIMO booth at Glasstec 2014, Düsseldorf (October 21 through 24) in Hall 11, booth number 11A07 and at the presentation “Towards Novel Products, Performance and Cost Improvements by Means of Laser Treatment of Glass” on 20 Oct. 2014 at 5:40 PM at the convention “solar meets glass” (Exhibition Grounds Düsseldorf).