Plastics are used increasingly in various industrial sectors such as medical device and organic electronics manufacturing. Medical device applications include manufacturing of implantable devices like stents, catheters and wires, which need to be structured and cut using lasers at the highest possible quality with minimum heat damage. As the flat panel display market moves from LCD to organic LED (OLED) display technology which utilize plastic materials, laser structuring and cutting of plastics with high qulity is needed. Please see
High Speed Processing of Plastics with a 100 W Femtosecond Laser for additional information.
Laser processing of heat sensitive polymers is finding wide use in various manufacturing sectors such as medical device and organic LED manufacturing. For example, heat sensitive, bio-absorbable polymers are increasingly used for production of bio-degradable stents. Because of the low melting temperature (usually below 200° C) of bio-absorbable polymers, any heat load to the surrounding areas during processing should be minimized. Therefore, using femtosecond (fs) pulsed lasers for micromachining of bio-absorbable polymers is highly promising due to the non-thermal nature of laser-material coupling and the possibility of structuring very small, micron-scale features Please see
Laser Micromachining of Heat-sensitive Polymers using a femtosecond, high power and high energy laser for additional information.
