Wednesday, November 18, 2009
nmLaser Products, Inc. announced its new FlexSorb line of high performance laser shutters incorporating a non-contact electromagnetic design and thermal dissipation.
The new FlexSorb family of shutters features a high damage threshold, quick switching speed, small size, and quiet operation. The only moving part is a low-mass, flexible, ferromagnetic cantilever membrane that is moved in and out of the beam by non-contact electromagnetic techniques, reducing opening and closing shock, vibration, and wear.
Engineers at nmLaser developed the FlexSorb shutter line with its non-contact flexure designed to close at a position slightly away from the pole, essentially floating in air to eliminate any potential vibration or bounce caused by impact deceleration of even the low-mass flexure.
These flexures are unaffected by foreign particles clinging to the magnetic pole and offer much longer lifetimes. Wear particulate accumulation is low, with off-the-shelf models rated for clean room use. All units are immersion cleaning compatible and can be provided for clean room type applications.
Slightly overdamped controllers eliminate system ring, ensuring efficient energy transfer to the magnet. The heat from the efficient magnetic design is merged with the laser optical absorption heat, and is dissipated using thermal conduction to a common, convenient mounting surface, achieving superior thermal dissipation. The built in beam dump absorbs high CW power levels with excellent damage resistance from high fluence pulsed lasers.
Engineered materials, geometry, and surface morphology give very low backscatter from DUV through FIR wavelengths. Units are designed for use with 24 V type circuits with a timed impulse to open and a lower voltage for long term hold. Position sensors, both logic circuit and mechanical switch, are offered on most models.
Aperture sizes range from 3 mm to 14 mm. Fast switching speeds target OEM safety interlock and processing application requirements, ranging from under 10 msec to 50 msec for larger apertures.
Summary of Features:
- Non-contact electromagnetic design
- Superior thermal dissipation
- High damage threshold
- Models rated for clean room use
- Very low backscatter DUV through FIR
- Aperture sizes from 3 mm to 14 mm
- Switching speeds from under 10 msec to 50 msec
- Small size and quiet operation
Customizations addressing switching speed, holding efficiency, package miniaturization, cost and weight are available. Semi-customizations for apertures, body geometry, or optical mirror and absorber requirements are also available.
nmLaser’s FlexSorb family of shutters can be adapted to meet a wide variety of applications and optimized for specific OEM product lines. nmLaser supplies custom and off-the-shelf laser shutter solutions for an array of industries, including scientific, medical, military, semiconductor processing, biotechnology, micromachining, welding/cutting, lidar, chemical engineering, graphic arts, forestry, and pollution monitoring.
nmLaser Products, Inc., www.nmlaser.com