ThyssenKrupp Steel Europe, Fraunhofer IWS, LIMO partner for laser research

ThyssenKrupp Steel Europe, the Fraunhofer Institute for Materials and Beam Technology (IWS), and LIMO (Lissotschenko Mikrooptik GmbH) have initiated development work on a new laser technology that the partners will use to improve the properties of steel strip surfaces. The collaboration, part of the OSLO research project by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), is scheduled to be completed by 2017.

Together, these organizations are researching how the properties of ferrous steel strip materials can be influenced in a targeted manner by laser surface treatment in a continuous inline, wide-strip process. To provide steel with better corrosion protection, for example, the laser will uniformly heat the steel's surface layers over the entire strip width. Since the laser heats only the surface rather than the entire volume of the wide strip, the process also is energy-efficient and environmentally friendly.

"To enable these types of short-time surface treatments, a laser system never before available anywhere in the world has to create a length-scalable, uniform, and extremely thin line of light," said Dr. Jens Meinschien, vice president innovations management at LIMO. "To meet this challenge, we're engineering a powerful 35-kW semiconductor laser featuring sophisticated beam shaping and high beam quality."

The partners aim to develop a new type of laser surface treatment and possibly bring it to maturity for eventual series production.