Heat-Sensitive Polymers

Micromachining Heat-sensitive polymers using a femtosecond laser

Heat sensitive bio-absorbable polymers are widely used for production of bio-degradable stents. Due to a low melting temperature of such materials, heat load during processing must be minimized. This favors femtosecond lasers over other sources for micron-scale structuring.

High pulse energy and high average power is essential to increase the processing speed of the material. When using picosecond pulses the laser ablation process runs in a thermal regime and leads to a formation of melts and modification of the material along the cutting, thus the material property and/or composition within the modified area is altered. Production requires then a post-processing steps which increase the time and add more cost.

This can be avoided by using femtosecond pulses for ablation to run the process in thermal regime. No heat affected zones and no melts can be achieved thus greatly increasing the process quality and speed.

Further increase of the processing speed can be seen at shorter wavelengths (for example 515nm) as the pulse energy is more efficiently used for ablation of transparent materials.

Our laser offers process flexibility with programmable pulse energy, repetition rate, and pulse width.

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