There are many kinds of vulnerable parts of laser cutting machines. Today, I mainly introduce protective lenses in laser cutting machines.
As the name implies, the protective lens is used to prevent dust and slag splashing from damaging the focusing lens. In addition to being used in laser cutting machines, it is also necessary in other laser equipment, including laser marking, laser welding and laser engraving. It can be seen that the application market of protective lenses is very large.
The prices of protective lenses on the market vary greatly, from tens to hundreds of yuan, and the quality is not the same. Of course, it is not uncommon for inferior lenses to be passed off as good ones. If the lens is not properly selected, it will cause large laser loss, frequent damage to the protective lens, unstable product quality, and serious losses to the enterprise. Therefore, choosing the right protective lens is a very important thing.
There are three steps to select the protective lens of the laser cutting machine:
1) The overall dimensions match, which is easy to understand;
2) Materials: according to different laser powers and considering the cost of use, K9 and quartz can be selected. In the actual application process, professional manufacturers divide these two types of materials into multiple grades, and customers can choose corresponding specifications according to actual needs
3) Coating, laser antireflection coating, adopt different coating technical parameters according to the use environment.
Although the protective lens of the laser cutting machine is a vulnerable part, in order to improve its utilization rate and reduce the production cost, the protective lens can be cleaned regularly to achieve the purpose of recycling. The following are the three cleaning steps summarized by high-energy laser:
- The protective lens material is ZnSe (arsenic zinc), which is relatively brittle and afraid of falling; Attention shall be paid during disassembly and assembly: do not use too much force or collide with hard objects. There is antireflection film on the surface, which is afraid of pollution, moisture, oil and scratch; Therefore, it is required to provide dry and degreased air in the work. Never directly handle the lens of the laser cutting machine to protect the lens, because skin grease will cause permanent damage to the lens surface. On the contrary, you can wear gloves and their special sets for operation. For smaller lenses, it will be more convenient to use optical tweezers or vacuum tweezers. No matter what method is used to clamp the protective lens of the laser cutting machine, it can only be clamped along the non optical surface, such as the frosted edge of the mirror plaque.
- In general, before use and before and after cleaning, it is necessary to check the lens protection of the laser cutting machine. Because the size of most pollutants and surface defects is relatively small, we often need to use magnifying equipment when inspecting lenses. In addition to amplification equipment, sometimes we need to irradiate the optical surface with a relatively bright light to enhance the specular reflection intensity of surface contaminants and defects, so that contaminants and defects can be more easily found.
- When cleaning a laser cutting machine protective lens, always use clean wiping paper and optical grade solvent to prevent it from being damaged by other pollutants. The wiping paper must be wetted with a suitable solvent and must not be dried. In consideration of softness, the available wiping paper is pure cotton webril wiping paper or cotton balls, lens paper, cotton swabs and other applicators.